


Good to be Alive (Right Now)

by Spockavenger (Maigen1266)



Series: Queer Verse [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Deaf Clint Barton, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Trans Female Character, Trans Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-19 04:45:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5954110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maigen1266/pseuds/Spockavenger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers never quite existed. In 1938 she chose to call herself Stella, and years later she started to call herself Captain America.<br/>She woke in 2011 to a world which still wasn't quite ready for Captain America to to be woman, and they definitely weren't ready for her to be a trans woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When she woke up, nothing about her had changed. She crashed into the ice, she was talking to Peggy and Howard, and now she was in a pale bright room with the radio playing. A baseball game she attended in 1941. With Bucky.  


She almost closed her eyes and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Maybe she could sleep through…everything. But instead, she sat up, and looked around the room. It looked like a hospital room, but a private room seemed strange. Or even the fact that there was a window overlooking New York. It was definitely New York though, she had drawn that skyline from enough different angles to be sure.  


It was then that a woman came in. She probably thought she was subtle. But she wasn’t quite comfortable in her clothes, she had probably never worn that outfit before. That all meant that although she looked like a part of the US Army, she wasn’t really.  


“Good morning,” the woman said with a little smile. Steve wondered if she was acting, or if she genuinely meant Steve no harm.  


“Where am I?” Steve asked as she stood and made herself as aggressive as possible. It wasn’t hard. She was huge and muscular, as much as she might rather be small the way Peggy was.  


God, Peggy. Steve hoped she was alright, it seemed like she and Howard and whoever they had working with them, didn’t find Steve, it was someone else, the Germans maybe.  


“You’re in a recovery room in New York City,” the woman replied. Steve paused and listened again to the radio. That was definitely the game from May 1941, she remembered the whole thing. She and Bucky went together to the game, and afterwards they had gone back to their apartment and Steve had shown off the dress she had been working on for weeks. It had been almost, but not quite finished. Just a couple seams to finish, but it had looked so good on her, and Bucky had been impressed at least.  


“Where am I really?” Steve said. For once she was really appreciating the extra height she gained with the serum.  


“I'm afraid I don't understand,” the woman’s voice was soft and hesitant. She really was a terrible actress.  


“The game. It's from May, 1941. I know, 'cause I was there. Now I'm going to ask you again. Where am I?” Steve said as she loomed over the woman. Steve almost didn’t see the door opening behind the woman.  


“Captain Rogers –” she said, but Steve didn’t really feel like sticking around, but she needed answers.  


“Who are you?” The woman didn’t seem inclined to answer and the men rushing into the room behind her looked like they were about to try and take her down. So Steve did what she could, she threw the men through the wall and rushed through after them.  


Steve expected to be in another recovery room, or a hallway or something, but the fake room was inside a much larger room. She didn’t stop to examine it all, just ran for the door as fast as she could.  


“Captain Rogers, wait!” The woman called after Steve, but she didn’t stop. As Steve flung open the door she heard the woman speaking again. She was calling for a “code 13”, but that meant nothing to Steve, so she decided to keep going.  


In the hallway, it was full of people in dark suits, Steve glanced around as fast as she could, and continued running in the direction which seemed less congested. She seemed to be on an upper floor of a building, so she ran around looking for stairs, and once she found them, she ran all the way to the bottom.  
Before she knew it she was somehow in the middle of what looked like Times Square, but couldn’t be. The shapes of some the buildings was right, the position of the roads was right, but everything else was wrong. She drew herself to a stop as automobiles surrounded her.  


And they were weird looking automobiles too. The lines of them were all wrong, no curves the way she was used to. Well, they had curves, but in all different places.  


People were staring at her, and she was officially surrounded by an obscene number of vehicles. It must have been twenty or thirty of them.  


A man walked out of one of the vehicles. He was a bigger guy, he was dressed in leather, and he had an eyepatch across one eye. He looked menacing, but no more than Gabe when he was serious, and less menacing than Schmidt. But then, everyone was less menacing than Schmidt when his mask was off.  


“At ease, soldier,” the man commanded. Steve didn’t snap to parade pose, which she thought the man probably expected, but also didn’t try to go anywhere.  


“Look I'm sorry about that little show back there, but. We thought it best to break it to you slowly,” the man continued after a short pause. Steve looked from the square around her to the man’s face.  


“Break what?”  


“You've been asleep, Cap,” he said, “For almost seventy years.”  


There was a long pause as the man seemed to wait for Steve to speak. She couldn’t seem to find her voice.  


70 years, Peggy and Howard were probably dead now too. Probably most of the Howlies too. Certainly any of Steve’s friends from before the war, not that she had many besides Bucky.  


Of course, 70 years did explain what had happened to Times Square. Technology, time, and invention it seemed.  


“You gonna be okay?” the man eventually asked.  


“Yeah,” Steve said slowly, she was still trying to process this information. “Yeah, just...I had a date.”  


God that date. Peggy would help her get ready, and Howard would take her out onto the floor. Steve would wear a dress like Peggy’s dress from the bar, she almost swallowed her tongue that night in envy. Maybe she and Peggy would dance too, that would be nice if Steve could wear a dress and have her hair done up and wear some lipstick.  


Steve closed her eyes sadly before looking back at the man in front of her.  


“I, uh, I guess I’m gonna need a place to stay then, won’t I?” Steve said wrapping the masculine persona more tightly around herself. If she could get a couple of cocky lines out, she could pretend to be the alpha male that she looked like.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the end of CA:TFA to the start of Avengers

Steve couldn’t sleep that night. Apparently she had been sleeping for the last 70 years, so that wasn’t all that surprising.  


An agent came and knocked at her door in the morning. Steve hadn’t slept a wink, but she gave the agent a small smile and allowed him to guide her around the building. The man, Nick Fury, had assigned her a room in SHIELD’s New York base for the time being. He said that he had people looking into an apartment for Steve and if she could just wait a few days she would be free to do whatever she wanted.  


She didn’t know what she wanted to do.  


The agent who picked her up, took her to a medical wing where they drew blood and took a million different tests for basically everything. Steve had dealt with a number of these tests back before the USO tour, but some of the tests involved new machines that Steve was quite sure hadn’t been around during the war.  


After all that testing the same agent took Steve to a cafeteria and gave her the office number for an agent he said would help her with anything Steve needed until her apartment was ready. Steve nodded along obediently, but resolved not to bother the agent. She could take care of herself.  


That resolve lasted until the next morning when, on the way to the cafeteria for breakfast, Steve noticed two women kissing down a hall where they wouldn’t be in everyone’s faces. It was clear that they weren’t making any real efforts to stay unseen, the hallway was well lit, and there were people walking past it all the time, many of them glanced down the hall as they passed, and saw the couple. But no one really reacted. If they felt that safe, then something must have changed in the last 70 years.  


So after breakfast Steve dragged herself across the building and up three floors to the office number she was given the day before. There wasn’t a name on the door, just the number and Steve supposed it was a spy thing.  


She knocked on the door, and a feminine voice told her to come in.  


Sitting at a large desk surrounded by paperwork with no less than six screens scattered around the workspace was a woman with her dark hair pulled tightly away from her face. There was something in her ear and she was looking at one of the screens while writing frantically across a piece of paper.  


Steve shuffled her feet a little and thought seriously about leaving the woman alone to her work. But after a moment the woman looked away from her work and gave Steve a tight little smile.  


“What can I do for you Captain Rogers?” she asked as her set her pen down and shuffled her papers together into neat stacks.  


“I need to know what I’ve missed while I was…sleeping,” she said firmly. The persona of Captain America had been honed in the war, but even before that she had worked to make a firm masculine persona out of Steve Rogers, tiny and sickly as she was back then. It hadn’t worked much, but it gave her excuses to beat up on bullies.  


She really hadn’t ever liked bullies, when she told Erskine that was her reason for wanting to join the war it had only been a tiny part a lie. She didn’t like bullies, and she did want to make a difference, but she could have made that difference as a nurse if she had the body to go with her mind, but she was too sickly for people to even consider her for the nursing corps. So she kept trying to enlist even though she knew they would reject her. She just kept on going because she couldn’t stand the idea that one day she would get the news that Bucky had died on the front and like her Ma, she had been left alone with a life she had to live alone and didn’t know how to.  


Steve was drawn out of her thoughts by the woman across the room speaking up.  


“Well, I can get you a couple of history books, but they’re all shit,” the woman said.  


“Are there better sources then?” Steve asked.  


“Well, there’s the internet, but I wouldn’t call it reliable. Broader though,” she said with a shrug.  


“The…internet?” The word was completely unfamiliar, but presumably this woman wouldn’t be trying to pull a prank on her. Presumably.  


“Yeah, it’s a computer thing, it’s a little complicated, but basically anyone who wants to can write whatever they want to and it’s available to the whole world,” the agent said.  


“That, well that sounds like something out of science fiction, but I think that would be a good place to start,” Steve said.  


She wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea of something like that, but it wasn’t like she had a better option. The history books were written by the winners and she had no idea what she should even be looking for in those books, and if they were much like books from before, they would mostly be specific to a single subject.  


“I’ll requisition a computer for you, I suppose while I’m at it I’ll get you a phone,” the woman started out strong and then trailed off, like she was making a list in her head. There was a brief moment of silence, then the woman refocused her eyes on Steve’s face and asked: “Was there anything else you needed?”  


“Actually, could I get a library card?” Steve asked, then realized that she wasn’t even sure if she was allowed to leave the building, “That is, if I’m allowed to come and go.”  


“You have complete freedom of the building, and I’ll get someone working on identification documents for you which match your appearance,” the woman said and picked up her pen again to scrawl something on a tiny pad of paper. She peeled up the page and stuck it on one of the screens in front of her.  


“Thank you, ma’am,” Steve said feeling grateful that it was all that easy. She missed a lot, but she needed to know just what she missed.  


Maybe if two women kissing was normal, she could be too.  


\--  


“Hey, Stevie!” Bucky called from down the block. She turned to look at him. Bucky was grinning ear to ear and had something clutched in his hand. Steve smiled back at him and stopped for him to catch up.  


She had been on the way to their apartment. Steve had been saving for months and had finally managed to save up enough money for some pretty buttons to finish off her dress. It was the second one she made, and while she probably could have just taken the buttons off one of Bucky’s old shirts, she wanted something pretty for this dress. She had just come from buying the buttons from the store, and they were made out of polished wood that was almost white it was so pale.  


“Hey, Buck,” Steve replied pitching her voice up just a little bit. There wasn’t anyone nearby and she could be herself around Bucky.  


“I just found this,” Bucky said excitedly thrusting a paper into Steve’s hands the moment he caught up.  


Steve uncrumpled the paper and saw it was an advert looking for an artist to work for a local business making posters. The advert had been torn out of a newspaper, and Steve had a funny feeling that Bucky had not bought the paper it came out of. It wasn’t like they could afford the paper all the time, and Bucky was even tighter with money than Steve. Bucky was always saving every cent he could so when the cold weather rolled in he could make sure they had any medicines that Steve needed. While she was grateful to Bucky for that, she always felt bad when he passed by a book he wanted or skipped lunch to make their food stretch a bit longer. Steve had tried to convince Bucky that he needed to take care of himself too, but he insisted on doing everything he could to take care of her.  


“This is perfect? What day’s paper is this ad out of?” Steve asked as they started walking again.  


Bucky always kept pace with her precisely. Steve’s legs were shorter and she couldn’t exert herself too much without having an asthma attack, so Bucky took shorter steps and made sure he never got ahead of her.  


“Today’s, one of the guys at the docks brought the paper with his lunch. I saw the ad and asked him if I could have it,” Bucky told her. He was smiling down at her, and she loved these moments when it was just to two of them. These moments where she wished she was wearing a dress, but knew it wasn’t safe for her to.  


“I’ll apply first thing in the morning then, before I go down to ask for some hours at the grocer’s,” Steve told Bucky cheerfully. Maybe she’d be able to put a little money aside and they could afford to feed Bucky properly as well as buy medicine when Steve inevitably fell sick this winter.  


“I was thinking we might go dancing tonight,” Bucky said conversationally as they climbed the steps into their apartment building.  


“Yeah? And where would we be going dancing?” Steve asked.  


That wasn’t actually what she was asking. It was pretty clear that she was instead inquiring whether she’d be going dancing as Bucky’s male roommate, or as one of the ladies he took out on the town.  


“I was thinking we’d go up away from the docks a little bit, past our normal haunts,” Bucky said casually, and Steve’s smile could have lit the whole city.  


\--  


It turned out that Steve missed a lot of stuff by sleeping through the 1960s. A lot. Like the fight to end segregation, and the fight to allow women reproductive rights, and rights for men and women who liked the same sex as them. Then there was everything that had happened since. Steve got into the habit of reading years’ worth of old articles on news websites, she’d just go through one website for a day or two before moving on to the next. She even signed up to receive emails about new articles on a number of the news sites she found.  


Somewhere in her research the agent Steve spoke to, Deputy Director Hill as it turned out, dropped by Steve’s room as she was reading and handed her a folder, a set of keys, and a wallet.  


“The apartment is fully furnished and stocked with some basic toiletries and food. The wallet contains a debit card connected to a bank account with your back pay from the time you fell until now, and receives a monthly check of retirement pay from the Army. The wallet also contains a New York state driver’s license. The folder has any documents you might need, including the rental agreement on your apartment, a birth certificate, a Social Security Number, directions on how to use an ATM, and bank access information. Any questions?” Maria had looked stern and Steve just mutely shook her head.  


In the course of two months, Steve felt she was well versed enough on issues involving LGBT (she found that term too, it was nice to have something like that to communicate a feeling of community) in order to try and join one of the online communities where she could talk about her feelings. She tried to join a chat room sort of thing, but she didn’t like it much, then she started a tumblr and felt much more comfortable there. She didn’t have to talk at all if she didn’t want to, she could just see what other people had to say. And mostly they were saying that it was okay, normal even that she was a lady in a man’s body.  


By the time she had been online for two weeks she decided to use the name she chose for herself all the way back in 1938: Stella.  


\--  


It was late at night, but they had an actual room while they were all in London. Howard had brought three bottles of stupidly expensive alcohol and all four of them were drinking. Howard was pretty drunk already, Peggy kept blinking like her eyes weren’t focusing, and Bucky was smiling more that Steve had seen him do since before the war. Steve, of course, was sober.  


“You know, you should have a pretty name,” Howard said looking at Steve as if staring hard enough would make a name appear above her head.  


“She does,” Bucky said eagerly sitting forward on the edge of the bed.  


The room only had one bed and one chair, so Steve was sitting on the floor, Howard took the chair while Peggy and Bucky sat on the bed.  


“Yeah?” Howard asked looking away from Steve for just a moment to catch eyes with Bucky.  


“Yeah, she started callin’ herself Stella, back before the war and all this,” Bucky said.  


“Stella?” Peggy asked and looked over at Steve with a little smile on her face. “I like it, Stella.”  


Peggy said her name slowly, like she was tasting it. Every letter was drawn out, like when Peggy slowly licked her way through Stella’s mouth tasting every inch.  


“Yeah, Stella,” she said looking up at Peggy. Peggy’s pupils were wide and Stella knew how this night was going to go, so she stood, took the glasses from Peggy and Bucky’s hands, and she set herself between the two.  


When she and Peggy started kissing Bucky started in on the back of Stella’s neck, and before long Howard was crawling in with them.  


\--  


Stella used the money from the army to buy some paper and charcoal as soon as she found an art store. The one she used to stare through the window at before the war had long since been replaced by a clothing boutique. Although the boutique did have some very pretty dresses.  


Stella wasn’t ready to go shopping for dresses yet though, so she walked past the store as if she wasn’t picturing the way it had been 70 years ago.  


With her new supplies Stella started drawing again. She drew the view through her apartment window, she drew the way her hand looked smaller and narrower at one angle, she drew the stray cat that sat on the fire escape across the alley from her apartment, she drew the view from the roof of her building, she drew the faces of the people who lived in the building, and who happened to pass by as she was working outside at a coffee shop. But mostly she drew memories. Peggy and Bucky and Howard mostly. The rest of the Howlies sometimes, and occasionally someone she knew before the war. Of those, her mother was the most common. Her mother who had been dead years before the war, was gone almost 80 years now, and Stella could still smell the soap she used to wash their clothes and the perfume she wore on special occasions.  


But mostly, she drew Peggy and Bucky and Howard, sometimes one at a time, and sometimes together. She drew pictures of Peggy staring Bucky and Howard down after they had done something stupid, she drew pictures of Peggy and Howard sharing a kiss, pictures of Howard working and Bucky peering through his scope and Peggy standing straight with her gun aimed at some Hydra goon. She filled up whole notebooks of them in the first few months.  


By the time Stella had been awake for four months, she thought she was pretty well adjusted. She had people she spoke to regularly on tumblr, she posted her art even more often (although never anything of Peggy, Howard, or Bucky, they had all become fairly well known since the war ended, and Stella didn’t want anyone to know about her blog, certainly not SHIELD), and she had been looking at buying some lady’s clothes to go along with who she really was.  


Maybe that way it would be easier to shake the SHIELD surveillance.  


It took Stella all of three hours after moving into her apartment to realize that they were probably watching it somehow. So Stella found a store and bought a new phone (with a new phone plan that SHIELD hadn’t had hands in), a new laptop, and requested that she change her internet provider in the apartment. That was the easy part. Then she went through everything in the apartment looking for any bugs, or anything of that nature. She found several microphones throughout the apartment, a camera over every window and door, and a couple more cameras besides. She smashed all of them outside with a rock.  


Hill came by the next day.  


“So, you found all the bugs then?” Hill asked casually when Stella opened the door.  


“Yeah, I did. I don’t like being watched,” Stella said. She drew ‘Steve’ up around her like armor.  


“We need to make sure you’re safe,” Hill said.  


“Then stick a camera outside my apartment on the windows and outside the building or in the hallways or something. I don’t want them in here,” Stella said.  


“I’ll see what I can do,” Hill said. She turned around and left without another word. For the next few weeks Stella swept the apartment for more bugs every time she came back, but there was nothing, and she decided the trust that Hill had worked it out, and they wouldn’t rebug the apartment.

\--  


Eventually Hill showed up at the door to Stella’s apartment again. Hill wasn’t in her uniform, she wasn’t even in a suit, just a simple blouse and jeans. She looked comfortable and casual, she even had one hand in her pocket and a purse slung over a shoulder.  


“You need friends,” Hill said without preamble.  


“I’m fine,” Stella said firmly, she actually agreed 100%, but she wasn’t about to tell a woman she had spoken with four times that.  


“No, you’re not, so I’m taking you out to dinner. Get some shoes or something,” Hill told her.  


It was an order, even if it didn’t quite sound like one. So Stella did the only thing she could. She turned around and got sneakers out of her room and tucked her phone, wallet, and keys into her pockets and followed Hill out of the building.  


Hill took her to a diner a couple of blocks from Stella’s apartment. Stella had never been to this diner before, but she had walked past it enough and there was always some kind of nice smell drifting out.  


They hadn’t spoken on the walk over, and even after they were seated there was a silence hanging over them full of awkwardness. It wasn’t until after they ordered their food that Hill finally spoke.  


“I’m not good at friends, just so you know, but I’m in charge of making sure you integrate into the 21st century, and I’ve never once seen you talking with anyone but your neighbors, and you obviously don’t meet up with people outside of your apartment. So I’m here, to be your friend until you make real ones,” Hill said. She said it all like she was very sure of herself, but Stella could hear the uncertainty behind it.  


“Until the war I only had one friend,” Stella offered as a sort of peace treaty.  


“I only have a few people I really trust enough to call them friend. Six, maybe seven people.”  


Stella nodded in understanding. It was hard to trust people, and it must be even harder while working for a spy organization. Peggy hadn’t had many people before they met either, and few friends must just come with the territory of being an agent.  


\---  


The scientists had just finished yet another battery of tests when Peggy came in. Stella had been left by herself to finish putting herself back together. She was in the middle of pulling her shirt on when Peggy dropped herself into a chair and leaned back, looking tired.  


Stella straightened herself up and looked to Peggy in askance. They sat in silence for a long moment.  


“I think shooting all the men of the SSR might be a viable option right now,” Peggy finally said looking at Stella.  


“What have they done now?” Stella asked cautiously, hoping that Peggy wouldn’t think she was too presumptuous.  


“Oh, they’re just making arguments for further testing on you, but they’ve taken so many readings, and enough blood to drain an elephant dry, and there’s really nothing further testing on you would even show,” Peggy said.  


“Oh, well, I’d rather we not do more, if that’s possible,” Stella said.  


“Of course it’s possible, I’m going to bloody well stop them,” Peggy replied vehemently. There was a brief pause and Peggy spoke again, “you’re one of the only people I trust not to be an idiot.”  


“I think my friend Bucky would disagree with you there,” Stella said.  


“Well, I suppose you did sign yourself up for a secret government experiment, jump on a grenade, and chase after an armed Hydra agent through New York while barefoot. Perhaps your friend has a point,” Peggy replied. There was a little smile on her face, and Stella’s chest warmed the same way a smile on Bucky’s face would cause.  


“Well, the grenade was a dummy after all.”  
\---  


Hill started coming by Stella’s apartment every Friday. They went somewhere different every week, but they did go out together. They spoke quietly about Stella’s art, the state of political affairs worldwide, recent news in the NYC area, the new stores opening up nearby, and sometimes even Hill’s work. They never spoke of their pasts, the nightmares that woke Stella at least every other night, the long and unusual hours which Hill worked. There was no emotion to their conversations, and very little personal information. They were colleagues of a sort, but hardly friends.  


Eventually Hill knocked on the door in uniform and asked Stella to come to the office because Director Fury had a proposal for her.  


Fury’s office was as different from Hill’s as an office with the same architecture could be. Fury didn’t have a million screens, rather he had a series of holographic displays which were displaying some kinds of readouts that Stella couldn’t start to interpret. Fury himself was sitting behind the desk when Hill escorted Stella in. Stella reflexively fell into parade rest at the expression on Fury’s face. He hadn’t asked for Stella, nor even for Steve Rogers, he wanted Captain America.  


“You asked to see me, sir?” Stella said calmly. She had firmly placed the Captain America persona over herself.  


“Captain, we would like to ask you to join SHIELD,” Fury said simply. He cut to the chase quickly enough.  


“And what would my role be at SHIELD?” Stella asked.  


“Being Captain America, protecting people, you know, the usual,” that was Hill from where she stood off to the side of the room. She was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. Stella looked back to Fury, but he seemed to be in agreement with Hill’s statement.  


Stella thought about the entire idea for a moment. Perhaps if she was doing something the nightmares of Bucky falling, of the ice, of the war, of people she knew before being frozen in ice would be alleviated. Maybe she’ll just have different nightmares, but anything was better than watching the horrific mash of the worst moments of her life over and over again.  


“I’ll do it,” Stella said, then qualified, “When you need me, you can call me.”  


Fury seemed content with that answer and dismissed Stella. Hill lead Stella out of the office again and showed her to the armory so they could take her measurements to fit a uniform for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I know this story isn't super cheerful right now, but it will get better. There is a reason for the story title, and it's not sarcastic. So things will get happier, and shippier (it's eventual Steve/Bucky/Sam). I've got some really good scenes planned for the future, but I need to get through CA:WS first (I'm a little bit stuck there right now, but once I get through that movie things start to diverge from canon much faster).  
> So I'm going to try to post every Tuesday. We'll see how long that lasts, but it's the goal for the moment at least.  
> This story is not currently beta'd, but I do read through and edit before posting. If you find any glaring errors, feel free to point them out to me. I'll do my best to fix them.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Covers the Avengers

There was a gym a few doors down from Stella’s apartment, it was even an old style gym with a ring and punching bags and the whole nine yards. Stella realized this after one week in her new apartment, and she had talked to the owner and gotten permission to work out there (for a small fee) whenever she wanted.  


On nights when Stella was woken by nightmares her first response was to flick on a single lamp and pull her sketchbook and charcoals close. She always drew the focus of the nightmare, but if the nightmare was about Peggy falling from the train in Bucky’s place, Stella would instead draw Peggy offering her jacket to Stella after a mission knowing Stella would appreciate it better than Bucky’s or Howard’s even though it was always too tight at the shoulders and no one even started to think that Stella might be able to button the jacket closed and more than once Stella had ripped a seam on accident clinging to the jacket just a little too tight.  


Most nights Stella did a single piece, set her supplies aside, turned off the light, and turned over to sleep again. Some nights she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep just yet and she would draw a few more memories before trying to sleep. Every once in a while she needed to burn off the energy and the adrenaline from the nightmare. So she’d go down to the gym, let herself in, and start in on one of the bags.  


That’s precisely how she ended up working out at two in the morning when Director Fury himself came into the gym with a folder in hand four months after she woke from the ice.  


\---  


Coulson did not really make her comfortable, for all that the way he held himself and dressed was obviously meant to be so unassuming no one ever noticed him. Besides the problems of the fact that he watched her while she was sleeping (presumably just after being pulled from the ice), he also had this weird hero worship for the idea of who Captain America should be. She was not that ideal, in fact she was so far from that ideal that she sometimes wondered idly if she might have been a good actress if she hadn’t been so goddamned determined to join the army. And look where that got her.  


The rest of the team she would be working with were better, but not by a lot. Agent Romanoff was sarcastic in a way that reminded Stella of soldier’s humor back during the war. There was no one so well endowed with dry wit than people whose lives were at stake every day and who committed violence on others in the name of some vague idea of duty. Romanoff was distant though, and seemed unwilling to make any attempts at real connection with the rest of the team. Dr. Banner seemed like a quiet man who liked peace more than anything. The fact that he turned into a giant green rage monster might have had some bearing on that. But Banner, as a whole, seemed like a good person whom bad things had happened to. Stark on the other hand reminded Stella of every single undesirable trait that his father had ever possessed. He was arrogant, self-absorbed, and felt some need to point out to everyone in the room that he was, in fact, smarter than all of them. Besides all that, the man made jokes about Fury’s eyepatch, which were in terrible taste. You don’t make fun of an old injury from a soldier and for all that Fury was a spy, he was clearly a soldier first.  


(What Stella wouldn't admit to herself was that he was too much like his father. He held himself in the same careless way, he talked about things beyond her, like he expected everyone to understand, And there was something about that dumb goatee that reminded her painfully of how Howard would spend an hour trimming away at his mustache to make sure it was precisely the right shape. Seeing Howard in Tony was too painful to contemplate, so Stella hated him instead.)   


Stella thought someday the lot of them might be capable of working as a team, but as things stood, she didn’t know how she would ever be able to work with this misfit group, let alone try to lead them. And that was what Fury and Coulson had planned, she had no doubt. They wanted a symbol of the American Way in charge of this thing, and Stella thought the two of them were just plain crazy.  


\---  


“So you’re going to lead us into battle,” Bucky said softly as he wrapped his arms around Stella and curled around her. They didn’t have a lot of room on the camp cot, and it was honestly probably a bad idea to put two people as big and muscular as the two of them on it, but they both needed the comfort of the other close by.  


“Well, they promoted me to Captain and told me to pick a team,” Stella said into the dark. Bucky didn’t fit around her the way that he used to. She was bigger than him now, and in order to position his head by her shoulder, her feet and lower legs were hanging off the cot.  


“They promoted you to Captain and told you to sell war bonds,” Bucky countered. Stella smiled.  


“Then I rescued 200 men from Nazi hands and brought them through miles of enemy territory without losing anyone else.”  


“You stole a plane with a civilian pilot and dropped the Army’s greatest science success into Nazi hands.”  


“But I brought back men from a number of allied militaries and swelled the ranks on this front because most of the men were in fighting shape.”  


“You snuck out to meet up with your guy.”  


Stella didn’t respond, just gripped Bucky’s hand around her middle tighter and curled her legs up toward her chest in an effort to keep Bucky close.  


He was right of course. She had disobeyed direct orders in order to rescue her secret boyfriend and she had put everyone at risk by going herself with the risk of her being captured and the Nazis gaining the secret to Erskine’s formula. They should have given her a dishonorable discharge, or put her in prison. They let her choose a team of some of the best soldiers she could find and they only fought a little over her having a Japanese-American and a black man on her team. She got them approved after only an hour and a half of stubborn arguing with Colonel Phillips.  


\--  


Stella didn’t know how to react to Loki. Instinctually she didn’t like him. He was standing in the middle of a crowd commanding the people of Stuttgart to bow down before him the first time she saw him. It was about the worst impression anyone had ever managed to make for Stella. Although Johann Schmitt came pretty close what with the whole peeling his face off thing.  


His big brother coming along and kidnapping him to take him to some other planet didn’t exactly help anything. Although Thor seemed to be motivated by trying to save Loki, rather than punish him, and Stella couldn't quite understand why. You didn't try to save murderers. So by the time the SHIELD guards were escorting Loki through the helicarrier to his brand new cell, Stella didn’t trust him, didn’t like him, and was generally sure that the man was up to far more than they could even begin to fathom.  


Stella watched through monitors as he was escorted, and the whole time she was thinking that she had missed something. That something important had happened and it had gone right past her notice.  


Stella’s encounter with Stark and Banner in the lab was not quite what she expected. Stella had hoped she could trust the two of them, and SHIELD, but with Stark stealing information from the agency, she found that she would need to act on her doubts herself. So she went digging.  


No one tried to stop her as she walked through the tight corridors. She was still in her uniform, and it was rare that anyone would stop her while in uniform anyways. Something she was only just discovering.  


\--  


Stella found that anytime the Howling Commandoes stayed for a little while at a new post, everyone questioned her stars and stripes. She was more likely to be teased by the American troops though. The British troops seemed to think that an idiot wrapped in a flag was inevitable from the Americans.  


(Stella made efforts not to mention the British equivalent supposedly fighting in France)  


But the troops from back home were mostly familiar with the idea of Captain America and thought that he was an absurd caricature after seeing what real war looked like.  


Stella thought he was an absurd caricature for that matter. He was idea and a dancing monkey and had little to do with the person Stella was or the reality of how war and the world in general worked. He fought some kind of simple war where things could be solved by punching a little man in the face.  


The Howlies had just gotten back from a mission on the France/Germany border to take down a Hydra base. The base they were guests at until their new orders arrived was in Belgium near the border with Luxembourg and France. It was an American outpost, but Stella heard snatches of French and German from groups of men she passed as she moved through the temporary buildings in the middle of what was probably once a pasture for cows.  


“If it isn’t Captain America himself,” came an angry voice from out of the crowds surrounding the mess hall. Stella turned to find herself suddenly face-to-face with Hodge, who she hadn’t seen since the day after the grenade incident.  


“You’re just a show pony for the people back home, make everything look sparkly,” Hodge continued looking irate.  


“I go where my orders send me,” Stella responded calmly. She was a little happy that Bucky hadn’t been here when Hodge started to pick a fight. Bucky would have started a brawl by now.  


“That’s not what I heard,” Hodge growled as he stepped even closer to Stella. His voice was relatively quiet. Few people had taken notice of their conversation, and those who had, hadn’t continued to watch.  


“Don’t believe everything you hear then,” Stella replied as she refused to be moved. Nowadays she was every bit as tall as Hodge and more muscular. She had given up on backing down around the same time she turned twelve and it became clear that she was never going to catch up height wise with the boys in her class.  


Hodge moved in tight, only inches from her face before he spoke again, his voice low, “I know what you did, Rogers.”  


The fact that he had put the pieces together surprised Stella, although it probably shouldn’t have. He was, after all, a candidate for Project: Rebirth. They had tested them for a lot of things at Camp Leigh, and one of those things was skills in observation. He must have realized that Captain America came into being after the Project should have been completed and that Captain America had nearly superhuman abilities on the battlefield. Anyone who had been involved in the project probably should have been able to put things together.  


Stella was shot out of her surprise by the sound of Dum-Dum yelling for her. She turned to look and found all of the Commandos standing by the door to the mess hall.  


“Excuse me,” Stella said and stepped sideways with her eyes trained on the man in front of her before deliberately turning her back on him. He wouldn’t attack her in front of her men. He knew just what they were capable of.  


\--  


Stella’s discovery of the Hydra-like weapons sent a bolt of betrayal through her. She wasn’t entirely sure who she felt betrayed by, whether it was Fury or Hill or Howard, but the emotion was enough to tighten her chest and make her want to cry. Instead she took the gun and dragged it back through the corridors and dropped it onto one of the tables in the lab just in time to answer Stark’s question.  


(She might not have planned the dramatic entrance, but she appreciated the power it loaned her anger in that moment.)  


Then Loki’s minions attacked and Bruce Hulked out and Loki escaped and Coulson died and Stella had no idea what order it had all happened in by the time she was sitting at a table across from Stark and listening to Fury.  


Stella wasn’t upset about Coulson’s death because she liked the guy in particular. Hill’s death or Stark’s or even Banner’s would have hit harder. Stella had barely had a single conversation with the man. No, his death hurt because she should have been able to prevent it. If she had figured out what she was missing sooner, if she hadn’t gotten into a pissing contest with Stark, if she had just let Thor take him, if, if, if.  


So Stella was ready to fight. Not for a guy who idolized the idea of Captain America, but for a chance to fix her mistakes. Besides, Stella had never once backed down from a fight with a bully, and she wasn’t about to start now.  


And the Avengers worked. It seemed odd for Stella to realize after the Hulk joined the fray that the six of them were working as a team without any training or maneuvers or plans. Somehow they could complement each other. Even after the frayed edges from the start, they were working together, almost seamlessly. Stella, Romanoff, and the Hulk were mostly on the ground while Stark, Thor, and Hawkeye worked from above. They rarely had to ask where someone would be, they simply anticipated their next move based on what they could see of the battlefield. Hawkeye was especially adept at that. Stella lost count of the number of times she would turn around to find an alien with an arrow through its head.  


She never once had to listen to a warning unless someone else couldn’t get there first. It was honestly remarkable how smoothly things went considering the fact that they were in the middle of a battle for the city of New York.  


When Stark went through the portal with the nuke Stella was sure for a long moment that she had lost the son of a man she had loved once. And when he fell Stella knew Howard’s ghost would never be able to forgive her for losing his son.  


And then he was fine.  


Stark woke, cracked a couple of joke, and led the way through the carnage of Manhattan up to his tower and then up the miles of stairs to the penthouse.  


When they arrived Loki was still lying in the brand new crater in the middle of the floor and he appeared unconscious. They dealt with him, got him into a prison that didn’t fly, cuffed him with a device which Thor swore would prevent him from using his magic and they all walked down the block to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant which Stark insisted had something called ‘shawarma’.  


They didn’t speak through the whole time they were eating. It was only after Stella, Bruce, and Thor had consumed a minimum of three servings apiece that a stilted conversation began. Unsurprisingly it was Stark who started it.  


“So, you knew my dad,” Stark was clearly addressing Stella.  


“I did, quite well actually,” Stella replied as calmly as possible. She wasn’t about to out and admit the fact that she had been in the middle of a polyamorous relationship with Howard, Peggy, and Bucky during the war. It was information which Stark probably wasn’t ready to hear about his dad anyways.  


“So,” Stark said slowly staring at Stella intently, “he wasn’t always a dick then?”  


“No, he was pretty much always a dick,” was Stella’s reply, which shocked a laugh out of Stark and Barton both. Romanoff was obviously amused as well by the way her eyebrow raised and the left side of her mouth curled upwards.  


“Captain America just cursed,” Barton said looking a little thunderstruck, “I just heard Captain America say ‘dick’.”  


“I’m a soldier from World War II,” Stella replied with a raised eyebrow of her own, “And I grew up poor near the docks in Brooklyn. I’ve said a lot worse than ‘dick’ in my time.”  


Barton just blinked at her like the man hadn’t ever seen her before.  


“Well, I suppose there are worse things to learn about an American Icon,” Stark said slowly, as if savoring the words. “I mean, what if Abe Lincoln lied about something?”  


Romanoff looked like she wanted to say something, but Banner beat her to the punch.  


“Actually, apparently the whole cherry tree thing is a myth,” he said looking smug, Barton nodded along knowingly, no one at the table was shocked, although Thor looked like he had no idea what everyone else was talking about.  


Barton suddenly leaned back in his seat, his whole posture relaxed and open. He grinned at them, then reached into his left ear and pulled out a small piece of plastic and silicone. He set it down on a clean napkin, pulled one out of his other ear, and wrapped both pieces into the napkin before shoving said napkin into his pocket.  


He grinned across the table and said, “They were starting to ache. Four days with them in is a little much.”  


Banner and Stark went still in some kind of realization that escaped Stella. It seemed that whatever it was had passed by Thor as well, because he was studying the other men at the table with a confused look on his face. It wasn’t until Romanoff’s hands started moving in what was clearly some kind of sign language that Stella saw what the two men had seen immediately. Barton was deaf.  


It had been a long time since Stella had last seen someone use sign language, and even longer since she had last used it. She caught only a few words of what Romanoff was expressing, and couldn’t grasp the overall meaning at all. Barton replied in the same language.  


Stark finally found his voice again and said, “Well, that’s news.”  


Stella and Romanoff both gave Stark dirty looks, but it was Romanoff’s expression which seemed to worry him. But then, the two of them had some level of history, and Stark had probably learned the hard way to fear Romanoff.  


Barton looked around the table and opened his mouth to speak even as he used his hands to gesture his meaning in sign language at the same time, “Yeah, I’m deaf. There were only four people in SHIELD who knew: Fury, Hill, Coulson, and my doctor. And Nat, obviously.”  


“Think you might teach me some sign language?” Stella asked after watching the way his hands moved. Stella had only recognized one sign. Maybe the language had changed since the thirties. Or maybe she was even rustier than she thought she was.  


“Maybe if we find some time,” This time when Barton spoke his hands were still. Stella knew a polite rejection when she saw one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter contains two of my favorite scenes. The conversation between Stella and Bucky on their cot, and the start of the conversation in the shwarma restaurant.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Avengers to Winter Soldier

After everything with Loki and the Chitauri Stella felt a little at loose ends. She tried to go back to her art and her tumblr and she just felt lost. She still got a few notes for every half-hearted sketch of the process of rebuilding New York. She got a couple hundred for the sketch she did from memory of Hulk snatching Stark from the sky as he fell.  


She didn’t post any more pictures of the Avengers.  


That’s not to say she didn’t draw them. She had sketches of Romanoff’s profile, and the hugeness of the Hulk’s fists as they slammed into aliens. Sketches of Chitauri and the giant whale-like creatures which had been so terribly hard to stop. She woke from nightmares of Chitauri shooting Peggy or Howard or Bucky just as often as she woke from nightmares of Bucky falling, or the plane crashing with the echo of Peggy’s voice. She found it harder and harder to make herself draw a happier moment after those nightmares. She would start her charcoal in the lines of Bucky’s grin and find that they were really the outlines of a Chitauri speeder.  


She was barely sleeping, forgetting to feed herself when she finally posted another image on her tumblr which was not ‘safe’, wasn’t a building or a stranger. She posted an image of Barton and Romanoff back to back shooting into crowds of Chitauri. The Hulk was in the background smashing into more. Stark and Thor were in the air, Thor’s hammer a blur as it was swung in his fist. She drew herself into the middle, facing away from the viewer, if the lines of her body were thinner, softer, more curvy…? Well, no one was likely to notice.  


It got a lot of attention, that sketch. Hundreds of thousands of notes on tumblr, people tweeting about it, Buzzfeed wrote a blurb about it, people on facebook were passing it back and forth all over the place. Stella hadn’t thought it was that good, but her inbox was full of asks about it. Was she there? Did she meet any of the super heroes? Were Thor’s arms really that muscly? Could she do commissions?  


She had thousands of new followers overnight. She didn’t answer any of the asks. She wrote a single post about it all: _Yes, I was in New York that day. I have trouble sleeping from the nightmares, so I draw instead. I’m not interested in doing commissions, and I don’t really want to talk about it all. If I do more work about that day, I’m probably not going to post it, if I do, it’s for me. I’m sorry if I’m being abrupt, but I can’t and won’t talk about it._  


She felt a little guilty about how abrupt her post was, but she was also done with the messages. It didn’t stop them, but they slowed down a little bit. She lost quite a few followers, but others sent her happy messages about how nice her art is, and how great they thought it was that she was finding a way to cope.  


And she was, sort of. She started running missions for SHIELD. She ran a couple of solo missions, but mostly they sent her out with STRIKE Team Alpha. The team was pretty decent, seemed like good people, but Stella kept her distance. She was a part of the team, but she kept herself separate.  


Then Romanoff was assigned to the same mission.  


“Long time, no see,” Romanoff commented lightly as she stepped up next to Stella by the holographic display outlining mission parameters. Rumlow had just finished his briefing, and the rest of the STRIKE Team had drifted off to finish getting geared up.  


“Since we saw Thor and his brother off,” Stella replied simply. She was wearing the more sedate uniform SHIELD had designed for her. It unfortunately made her shoulders look even broader, which made it impossible to appreciate the way it made her waist look narrower.  


“Yup,” Natasha popped the p at the end and smirked at Stella. The redhead had grown her hair out a little, it went down to her shoulders, but she it was still styled to drift around her face. Stella did her best not to be envious that Romanoff could choose to wear her hair long.  


“And what have you been doing since?” Stella asked without looking more fully at Romanoff. She had drawn that profile a number of times in the last two months, but Stella realized now that she hadn’t quite gotten it right. The shape of her cheeks wasn’t quite what Stella had seen in her nightmares, and her nose was turned just slightly further upwards.  


“Working,” Romanoff replied simply. Stella looked over at her then. Romanoff was smiling, but it wasn’t an open smile, there was something about it which was almost a smirk. Stella wondered if Romanoff knew how to smile openly. It was entirely possible that the other woman didn’t have a clue, that she had never in her life had the opportunity to learn.  


“Me as well, I suppose,” Stella said feeling a little unsure of herself.  


“I heard, your art is pretty impressive,” Romanoff added with what was clearly a smirk. Stella felt her insides freeze. She didn’t want SHIELD to know what she had been doing. She didn’t want anyone to know.  


“I didn’t tell anyone, you know,” Romanoff continued, “Saw the buzzfeed article, put two and two together, came up with five. Only person who would have been close enough for that much detail in the Hulk’s fist? One of the Avengers, you’re the only artist.”  


“Could have been someone in one of the buildings,” Stella contested.  


“There wasn’t, they had cleared out almost an hour prior. No survivors were found in the buildings after it was all over,” Romanoff replied, “In fact they were cleared within twenty minutes of us leaving the site to deal with Loki.”  


Stella didn’t bother to reply. If Romanoff was right about the survivors being cleared, then there was no way that she would be able to convince her that the art hadn’t been Stella’s.  


“Like I said, I didn’t tell anyone,” Romanoff continued, her voice soft so that STRIKE Team Alpha couldn’t hear, as they moved in more centrally to the holographic display.  


“Thanks,” Stella finally said. She liked her secrets to be her own, but if she had to share them with one person, at least she knew that the other woman could keep a secret.  


\--  


The first time she met Peggy Carter, Stella was already half in love with her. The other woman was beautiful, but still strong enough to beat anyone’s head in, even if that person was a man twice her size and triple her weight. She was the kind of woman Stella wanted to be, and for that Stella found herself falling for her.  


It wasn’t a new feeling, Stella had been deeply in lust over a couple of the girls in the neighborhood. None of them had been much interested in her, but she had hoped that maybe someday she would find a girl who would be interested in her, and willing to see her as the lady she really was, instead of the man she looked like. She found Bucky though, and he never once questioned Stella’s insistence that she was a woman.  


Stella had been happy with Bucky since before her Ma died. They kept it a secret from everyone, since if anyone knew about them, they’d probably beat Stella to death. Stella had never shaken the idea that Sarah Rogers had known exactly what was going on, that she knew about how Stella sometimes stole her dresses for an hour or two when Sarah was working a late shift. But Stella could never bring herself to ask Sarah what she knew, and when Sarah died and Stella returned to their apartment Stella was not only mourning the loss of the most important woman in her life, but also the things she had never said, and had never asked. Without Bucky, Stella wasn’t at all sure that she would have gotten through the years that followed.  


But then here was Peggy Carter while Bucky was away and Stella felt every inch the cheating housewife while her husband was away at war. And then Stella was chosen as the final candidate for Project Rebirth, and Stella worried for three nights that she was going to die before Bucky came home from war, and that was worse than every thought she had about cheating on him.  


She survived of course, but at what cost. She was tall now, and muscular. She was the very embodiment of the masculine ideal. Would Bucky even still love her when she couldn’t fit under his chin as they slept anymore? Would he still want to lead when they danced now that she had broader shoulders than him? She was faster than him now, too. Would Bucky want to rescue her from her stupid fights now that she could win them? And god what would she even look like in a dress? She couldn’t possibly fit into the ones she took so much time and savings in sewing.  


Stella was seeing Peggy differently now. She seemed smaller. Not dainty, but delicate, like she was too fragile in body for the spirit and fight that her body contained. It was something she had seen in herself through Bucky’s eyes, but never noticed in Peggy until she was standing over her outside of the Vita-Ray machine. But before Stella could linger on those thoughts she was chasing the Nazi spy through the streets of Brooklyn down to the docks. She caught him, but he killed himself before he would answer any questions.  


And then as the doctors took their tests Stella lingered over her feelings for Peggy and her worries about Bucky and waited for things to get better. When the senator offered her a position she was overjoyed, when she found out what it was she was ready to scream. But she signed up for it so she took to the road with a gaggle of pretty women and played the part of some kind of patriotic ideal soldier-man. It was awful but she was just waiting for the moment when she could request an assignment on the front lines.  


Then she did. They performed in England to semi-bored soldiers who were bemused by her and were just waiting for the USO girls to go back on stage. Then they went to Italy and not a single cheer. In fact she got booed off the stage. Not that she could really blame the men, she’s not sure that she would really want to hear some bozo in tights telling them to take the fight to Hitler when that was exactly what they had been doing.  


And then there was Peggy behind the stage in the rain. She didn’t look like she had been on and around the front lines for months. Her hair was still perfectly styled and her makeup perfect, the lines on her nylons perfectly straight up the backs of her calves. She was a vision of feminine strength. Stella wasn’t sure if she wanted to be her, or to kiss her. Either was impossible, so she just left things as they were.  


“What are you doing here?” Stella asked as she tried to shield her doodles. Stella knew Peggy had seen them anyways.  


“Officially, I’m not here at all,” Peggy replied calmly, “That was quite a performance.”  


“Yeah. Uh...I had to improvise a little bit. Crowds I'm used to are usually more uh...” Stella wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence, “Seven.”  


“But I understand you Americans knew hope?” Peggy asked calmly. Stella could feel her insides twisting. Hope? Sure, maybe if you were ten and read the Captain America comics or something. But for these men on the front line? She was a joke, one more propaganda poster to listen to.  


“Bond sales take a ten percent bump in every state I visit,” Stella said simply. She felt a little dead inside. Was this really all she could do now? Sell bonds to people who barely have the money to feed themselves? Fund this war that never should have happened?  


“Is that Senator Brandt I hear?”  


“At least he's got me doin' this,” Stella replied. She was doing something, although it was something she wasn’t sure she really wanted to support. “Phillips would have had me stuck in a lab.”  


“And these are your only two options? A lab rat or a dancing monkey?” Peggy asked with some level of incredulity in her voice. “You were meant for more than this, you know?”  


Stella opened her mouth, she meant to answer, but the words wouldn’t come out. She wasn’t even sure what it was she was planning on saying. So she closed her mouth again without letting a single sound out.  


Maybe she meant to confess everything to Peggy. The warring dreams of happily ever after with Bucky Barnes, and fighting the good fight in Europe, and a happy if never quite perfect future with Peggy Carter. Maybe she was going to tell Peggy about how awful Stella had felt since the serum, how she was always too big, too fast, too strong, too much everything. Maybe she was going to tell Peggy about her dresses with their slightly crooked seams which she had sewn for herself or the nights Bucky would take her out dancing.  


“What?” Peggy asked looked seriously down at Stella.  


“You know for the longest time I dreamed about coming overseas and be on the front lines,’ Stella responded. And all that was true. She had dreamed for years of being out on the front lines and doing what she could. What she had always wanted was what Peggy had. Out on the front lines without ever having to be masculine, “Serving my country. I finally get everything I wanted, and I'm wearing tights.”  


“Schmidt sent out a force to Rosano. Two hundred men went up against him and less than fifty returned,” Peggy answered, and Stella would freely admit she had no idea where Peggy was going with all that, “Your audience contained what was left of the 107th. The rest were killed or captured.”  


And that got Stella onto her feet. The 107th, her father’s unit in the Great War, Bucky’s unit.  


“The 107th?”  


“What?” Peggy asked as Stella rushed up and around her. “What’s so important about the 107th?”  


“You remember me telling you about my buddy?” Stella asked as she gestured for Peggy to follow her.  


“Yes, your best friend, joined the army before he could be drafted for the monetary benefits,” Peggy recited back as she followed Stella out into the rain at a brisk pace.  


“The 107th is his unit, this is the unit he got shipped out with,” Stella replied simply. She didn’t turn to look at Peggy, she was single-mindedly focused on finding Bucky. If he was on the base somewhere they could have a night together before her next show. She couldn’t bring herself to reason through the alternative.  


Peggy spoke again, almost too softly for Stella to catch, certainly too softly for the men they passed to hear, “You love him.”  


Stella’s steps faltered and she did look over at Peggy.  


“I do.”  


There was a pause as Peggy examined Stella’s face.  


“Then I’ll keep your secret.”  


\--  


Stella and Natasha went on mission after mission together after that. They had the same handlers and coworkers, they had the same missions, they passed each other in the hallways on their ways to separate debriefs, and they had conversations.  


One night as Stella chugged down beer after beer she admitted that all the conspiracy theories about her relationship with Bucky had been right, but so had the popular love story about her and Peggy, as had Stark’s drunken thoughts about his father. Natasha kept that secret too. Then they started having weekly dinners to talk about life outside of work, about art, to ask about how Stella’s blog was going and eventually Stella found herself admitting her gender to the other woman.  


By this point Stella had done all the research. She knew about transgender (and which terms were no longer used, which were the most polite), she knew about the legal fights, and she knew that if she ever decided to come out to the world it would be one of the largest media stories of the decade. Natasha took the new information in stride and from that point forward Natasha never once referred to Stella as a man, and mostly avoided using pronouns in reference to her. And Natasha was so smooth about it, no one even seemed to notice.  


Stella had moved down to DC, and she ended her lease on the apartment in Brooklyn. It wasn’t the same place she remembered from before she joined the army, and she wasn’t that upset to be leaving. She hadn’t made any new relationships with anyone in her building or the neighborhood, and she could find a gym anywhere.  


She ended up not far from the Triskelion and surprisingly close to the river for the price of the apartment. It was an older building, with only one elevator which only worked about half the time. Her new apartment had in-suite washer and dryer, but there was also one down in the basement. Altogether she was comfortable and she found herself buying a drafting table to set up in the second bedroom, angled just right to catch the most of the light from the window.  


About a week after she moved in, a woman moved in next door. Stella helped her move her boxes in and found herself having conversations with the other woman on a regular basis. She was a nurse and had recently moved because this apartment was closer to her work, and she was dying from the commute into work every day. Sharon was a nice woman and Stella wanted to befriend her, but hadn’t brought herself to even call Natasha a friend yet, so she refrained.  


Stella started taking long runs around the Mall in the mornings. She’d lap the moms with jogging strollers, the twenty-somethings trying to stay fit, and the fitness nuts who ran just as far as her every morning.  


For Stella, the war had been less than a year ago. She lost Bucky just a little over a year before, and she awoke to find Howard gone, and Peggy barely there. She was trying not to be lost in grief, but she had truly loved four people in her life, three of them were dead, and the fourth wasn’t always aware that it wasn’t 1945 anymore.  


So Stella spent her days jogging and drawing, working and trying not to grieve too hard. She still woke from nightmares, that was unchanged by moving to DC or working more or finding people who could become as important to her as any of those she had lost. But now she started her jogs early instead of beating up punching bags, and that seemed to work just as well.  


Stella made a trip back to New York for the Stella Memorial Day. Natasha was already out of town and the only other person who really knew about her was too ill to leave her bed, let alone the state. Stella rode up on her motorcycle early the morning of the event and she attended alone, in a pair of jeans and a plain white t-shirt. She wished that she had the courage to come dressed as herself in a summer dress or to do up her makeup, but it had been so long since the days of Peggy applying a careful layer of powder and painting her lips red with careful strokes before they invited the boys in for the evening. How their relationship had remained a secret was the power of the willful ignorance and nothing more.  


So Stella went to the huge gathering that spilled out of the lobby of Stark Tower with her hands in her pockets and slouched just a little to seem not so tall, not so noticeable. Stark gave a speech about his recent realization that Stella had likely been a trans woman and Stella tried not to flinch. She had only had a couple of conversations with Stark after the Battle of New York. One had been an offer to move into the recently refurbished Stark Tower, another had been about Stark being unable to get ahold of Natasha (he had designed new Widow’s Bites for her, and wanted the redhead to come up to New York to test them), and the most recent had been a second invitation to move into the Tower, as well as an offer to upgrade her shield. Stella had turned down every offer. Tony was just a little too much like Howard for Stella to be able to stand it just yet, she wasn’t there yet.  


The Stella Memorial Day had first happened in early March of 1979. Howard was jumping on the band wagon with the Pride Parade going every year through the city. He scheduled it to happen the day after the Parade in ’79, and since then it had become a part of New York Pride Week. Howard was the organizer every single year until his death, and, according to interviews with people who knew Howard in that time, he had never let anyone take even one aspect of organizing the event from him. After his death it looked like the Stella Memorial Day was going to end, Obadiah Stane had no interest in the event, and had never even attended. Tony organized the 1992 Stella Memorial, while he was 14 and attending college at MIT.  


Stella knew all of this because when she had requested information about Howard about a week after she woke, Hill had handed her a huge file full of Howard’s greatest accomplishments and failures. The Stella Memorial had been a footnote, and as soon as she had gotten the hang of Google, she had looked up more information.  


Stella didn’t feel that she had been adequately prepared for just how big the Stella Memorial day had become over the years. Now there were booths set up around every wall of the lobby of Stark Tower, and spilling out onto the sidewalks around the building. The booths were manned by every LGBT+ organization in the city of New York, and most of the rest of the state. People were dressed in bright clothes, and some were wearing flags like capes, and groups of giggling teenagers wove between people handing out buttons and pamplets. Stella had barely stepped into the crowd before she had three different pamphlets shoved into her hands, and seven buttons. She was happy to see that one of the buttons was the pastel pink and blue of the trans flag, and she pushed that one into her pocket to keep. She wasn’t quite ready to pin it on herself.  


Stella wandered aimlessly through the crowds listening to snippets of excited conversation and people watching. She was distracted enough that she bumped into a woman dressed in a conservative gray suit. She looked infinitely capable and in control, even off balance from someone over a head taller than her bumping into her face first.  


“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Stella said reaching out to offer a steadying hand, but the woman had gotten herself under control easily enough without Stella’s assistance.  


“It’s no problem at all, these crowds are getting crazier every year,” the woman responded calmly, “I expect the event will have to be moved back towards Central Park, the building simply wasn’t intended for this level of crowds.”  


“Oh, do you work here then?” Stella asked.  


“Oh yes, and I expect I’ll be involved in getting this whole thing moved again,” the woman told Stella with a sort of wry looking smile. “The paperwork alone will be a nightmare.”  


“I know a little bit about nightmare paperwork,” Stella admitted thinking of the pile of paperwork she had left behind in DC in order to play hooky today and attend the event.  
“I’m Pepper by the way,” the redhead said as she offered her hand. Stella took it and only debated for a moment what name to give the other woman. She had decided to introduce herself as Steve, but somewhere between her brain and her mouth the name changed.  


“Stella,” she said and couldn’t take it back. Pepper’s expression didn’t change at all, but there was a flicker of some kind of understanding in her eyes.  


“It’s lovely to meet you,” Pepper said as they shook hands, “You know, if you’re going to be around, I think it would be lovely to have lunch sometime.”  


Stella responded before she could really think about to offer, “I think that would be nice.” Then she was digging around in her pocket for her phone, “Can I get your number so we can coordinate schedules?”  


“No problem at all,” Pepper responded and took Stella’s phone when it was offered. Stella had a StarkPhone, it was about two models behind the current model, but Pepper was obviously familiar with it, since she had inputted her information in less than a minute when Stella hadn’t opened up her contacts list before handing her phone over.  


“I’m going to text myself your name from your phone if that’s alright, then I’ll have your number as well,” Pepper informed Stella once she had gotten her information in. Stella just nodded. They said simple goodbyes and parted ways. Stella didn’t think to look at her phone again until she was putting it on the charger in her apartment back in DC.  


Pepper had entered herself into Stella’s contact list as ‘Pepper Potts’ and the text message Pepper sent herself read: Stella Rogers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is a little late, a combination of forgetting that it was Tuesday and technical difficulties is why it's late.  
> If anyone is curious, Tony's speech at the Stella Memorial day is in _Love Is For Children_ , the next story in this series.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Winter Soldier setup to Nick Fury's appearance in Stella's apartment

Stella found herself unable to really sleep that night. She drifted off just once, and woke unable to breathe properly from a panic attack following yet another dream of Bucky staring at her without seeing her, because he was lying dead in a pile of snow. Everything except Bucky’s face was always blurred away in those dreams, and all she could remember upon waking was fogged over look of his eyes as they stared right through her.  


So she started her jog even earlier than normal. The Mall was mostly empty, just a few other people out. The most notable was a fit black man who Stella found herself lapping repeatedly, despite the fact that he was lapping the few other people out and running before dawn. As manners as far as running went, Stella always announced her presence before passing him, to ensure there would be room enough to pass on his left side. But each time he saw her, or heard her coming, he would speed up to try to stay ahead of her for just a few more minutes. He never lasted long, but he seemed relatively good natured about it.  


Eventually Stella came around the Mall again and found the man sitting down at the base of a tree looking exhausted and he had clearly sweated through his sweatshirt. Stella found herself wondering if he was wearing another shirt under that sweatshirt. She turned her mind off the thought of what he might look like under his shirt in order to hold an actual conversation with him.  
Sam wasn’t afraid bring the sass and the sarcasm, and was obviously working to get over the whole long-ingrained hero-worship of the idea of Captain America, which most military and former-military seemed to carry around. It was certainly circulating through the SHIELD ranks and only a few people seemed past it (Fury, Hill, and Natasha being most notable).  


Stella made a mental note of when she started lapping Sam around the Mall, in the hopes that she would run into him again. She knew the beginnings of a crush when she saw one, but she had no plans on acting on it. At least not just yet.  


Stella had barely started a conversation with Sam when Natasha rolled up in her car to come pick her up. The mission was unexpected, Stella was supposed to have the better part of a week off, no need to even come into the office for paperwork. That was following after she was injured on their last mission, she was completely healed within an hour and sent home, but protocol was that an agent injured on a mission got the week off from everything. Then they went back on light duty until they were fully healed.  


The mission was a mess of course, it seemed to be going well right up until Stella realized that not everyone on her team had received the same mission. That was a tough pill for her to swallow, and she was probably a little too harsh on Natasha. She was definitely not too hard on Fury. Project Insight was not a good idea, it would never be a good idea, no matter how nice it might sound on paper that is far too many lives on the line for some kind of imagined safety.  


\--  


Stella was approached about an exhibit in the Smithsonian, in the American History Museum, three days after they sent Loki and Thor back to Asguard.  


She wanted to say no immediately, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to refuse before she really found out what they wanted. Whether she liked it or not, Captain America was a historical figure by now. Maybe she could get them to put some of that focus on the Howlies or the European Front in general, maybe it didn’t have to be about her.  


She drove down to DC on her motorcycle and got a room in a hotel for a couple of nights. She was surprised when she met the woman in charge of curating the new exhibit, finding the information that was useful and dismissing the things which were not.  


Melanie Torez was a tall woman with a commanding personality. She had thick dark hair pulled into a messy bun at the nape of her neck and she always had a think line of eyeliner on her upper lids. She dressed in smart skirt suits, but always wore sneakers with non-slip soles. No one seemed willing to comment on any part of her appearance and Melanie was not the kind of woman who appreciated un-asked-for opinions.  


So Stella rented an apartment and got involved in curating the exhibit.  


“I need more info on Barnes,” Melanie said somewhere around week three of their working together. Stella had managed to get some of the focus rerouted onto the Howlies, and there was a whole room planned about the first desegregated unit in American history.  


“What about him?”  


“Everything!” Melanie threw her hands up in exasperation as she spoke, “There are few actual facts about the man, and what is left is muddled with those awful comics from the forties and fifties where the man is portrayed as a teenage boy let onto the battlefield for God knows what reason.”  


Stella waited a moment before she spoke. She had to compose her thoughts. What could she say about Bucky that wouldn’t betray their relationship immediately?  


“He had three sisters, all younger than him,” Stella started slowly, “I…well, I don’t know what happened to them after the War, I never looked them up. I suppose I was a little scared to hear that the girls had died young, or something. I don’t know. Anyways, they were a good Jewish family, observed Shabbos, and went to the temple every week. Even after Bucky moved out of his parent’s apartment, he still went every week. Made me cook everything on Shabbos.”  


“There is nothing here that says he was Jewish, his records say Catholic,” Melanie complained. Her voice was low, and Stella knew the other woman was mostly just talking to herself. Even if she hadn’t, the impatient way in which she waved her hand when Stella paused would have given it away.  


“Well, no one sane went into Nazi Germany with something around their neck calling them a Jew,” Stella said with her head cocked to the side just a little bit.  


“…That didn’t occur to me actually?” Melanie said looking a little uncertain, “I wonder just how many World War II era soldiers hid their religion as a way of preserving themselves?”  


Stella let the other woman work through her thoughts for a moment.  


“I don’t know,” Stella admitted, “Bucky was the only person I knew who did that. I think he only did it because I had been watching the news of everything in Germany for years before the war really started. I mean, I was reading international news before Hitler was elected, certainly before he became the Fuhrer.”  
Melanie tilted her head to the side and gave Stella a considering look, “You were even more of an activist than the comics and biographies made you out to be, weren’t you?”  


“I haven’t read those biographies to tell you the truth,” Stella replied with a shrug, “But I guess you can get things right in this exhibit can’t you?”  


\--  


The Captain America exhibit was moved from the Museum of American History, and into the Air and Space Museum only a week after it opened. Or rather, they decided it had to be moved over a week after it opened. The hype on Captain America was so strong after the Battle of New York, that there were insanely huge crowds trying to move through the museum every day. The location in the Air and Space Museum was larger and they could make more room for a larger number of guests to move through.  


So by the time Stella was permanently moved into the DC area the exhibit had been open two months and been in the Air and Space for almost a month. Stella hadn’t seen the exhibit before, but she had put a lot of trust in Melanie to get things right.  


And everything about her was perfectly correct. Melanie had somehow gotten the Howlies’ estates to donate their uniforms from WWII, and some memorabilia from that time period. There was Dum-Dum’s flask, Gabe’s favorite radio, the pocket watch Monty refused to allow out of his sight, Dernier’s journal that he kept his poetry in, and a collection of Morita’s letters home. There were little biographic explanations of the importance of these items to the men who carried them through the frontlines of WWII, and little clips of them from the propaganda newsreels they had been in as the team behind Captain America.  


And then there was the corner devoted to Bucky. A huge photo of him and long paragraphs about him and his relationship with Stella. Or rather Bucky Barnes’s relationship with Steve Rogers. There were letters left in their apartment, which Bucky had written to Stella. They were intimate, but never let on their relationship. Bucky knew that the army was reading his letters and he didn’t want to get sent home, they needed the money the army paid more than Stella was ever willing to admit at the time.  


Those letters had been a matter of historical debate for at least twenty-five years. When Howard Stark eventually released some of Stella’s effects near the end of his life, historians had jumped all over those letters, as well as the ones to Bucky, which had been left in their London barracks when they were sent on the mission in Austria. A number of historians had immediately announced that they suspected that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes had been in a romantic relationship prior to the war (and possibly during as well). Of course the conservative media argued that it simply wasn’t possible that the two men could have been gay (no one even bothered with speculating that either might be bi or pan). The debate was still raging, although no one had enough guts to actually ask Stella just yet. Even Melanie had skirted the issue, and the display made no mention of the historical arguments still raging.  


They had set aside a side room to play interviews with different people who had known Stella back in the day. Stella sat through the interviews with Morita, Falsworth and Dum-Dum, but as soon as she got up to leave they started the interview with Peggy. Stella sat herself back down and watched all twenty minutes. If she was crying in the back of the darkened room, either no one noticed, or no one cared to call attention to the man crying in the back of the room.  


Stella made herself leave the museum after that. She knew better than to stay and watch the rest of the interviews, because as much as Peggy had wrecked her, she knew that sitting through an interview with Howard as well, would be all the worse.  


Stella wandered aimlessly around the Mall before finally finding herself climbing on her motorcycle to take her out of the city. When she found herself on the road to Peggy’s nursing home, she wasn’t really all that surprised.  


Stella had only been out to visit Peggy three times. As much as she loved the other woman, their lives had diverged in 1945, and Peggy’s mind had deteriorated further than her body. Her sharp wit and acid tongue were still there, just she forgot things. She forgot finding out that Stella had survived. She forgot that Howard had died (forgot Howard had married, that Howard had a son). She sometimes found herself in some lovely dream of 1944, where she was waiting on Howard and Bucky to arrive for the evening.  


\--  


Stella delayed visiting Peggy for months. She was waiting for a lot of things. She was waiting to feel comfortable in the 21st century, then she was waiting for her nightmares to slack off, and then she was helping rebuild after the Battle of New York. It was after the Stella Memorial Day that she finally realized that she had been avoiding it. Avoiding seeing her, seeing the one person left who Stella loved.  


So after a meeting with Melanie, Stella finally made herself go see Peggy.  


The nursing home where Peggy now spent her days was large and had the look of a building that had been a mansion in a past life. The door were wide and grand looking, and there was a huge porch out front with tall white pillars. An assortment of rocking chairs, and outdoor furniture littered that front porch.  


Stella arrived on the back of her motorcycle at quarter past two, and found herself staring up at the building. She was frozen in place, she barely managed to turn her motorcycle off, let alone take off her helmet or clamber off the vehicle. It was as a young couple left the building that Stella finally managed to stir herself into motion. They looked at her strangely, and she supposed that she was sort of a strange sight. After all, someone sitting on a motorcycle and staring up at a nursing home through the closed visor of a motorcycle helmet was not a normal sight.  


Stella shoved her helmet onto the handle of her motorcycle and dragged herself up to the front door, with the same air as a man going to a funeral. There was on old lady sitting on the front porch watching Stella’s every move intently, and completely ignoring the young man chattering on about something or other that Stella couldn’t be bothered to listen in on.  


Through the front doors was a small lobby with a reception desk that looked like it had seen better days. The man sitting behind the desk looked tired, like he hadn’t slept well in a week, or maybe he had been pulling strange shifts that didn’t allow for a full night’s sleep. But he still looked up, mid-yawn, when he heard the little bell above the door jingle.  


“Hi, how can I help you?” He asked, half covering his yawn.  


“I’m here to visit Margaret Carter,” Stella answered. The man immediately starting clicking away at the computer in front of him, and after a short moment looked back up at Stella with a questioning look.  


“Can I have your name and ID please?” He asked reaching his hand out over the desk edge. Stella dug into her back pocket and pulled forth the leather wallet which she had bought shortly after Hill had passed along all of the new documentation for her. The ID had a rather unflattering photo of her, which Stella still could not figure out when it was taken. She was staring off to the side of the camera lens, but was facing towards it, it was just her eyes which didn’t line up. She looked serious, maybe a little angry, but it was still obviously her after she woke up in 2011.  


“Steve Rogers,” she said and handed her driver’s license to the man. His eyes widened a little, but he didn’t say anything which would give away his surprise. He took the license and started typing away at his computer again. He eventually handed the card back along with a visitor’s badge which was a little sticker that said visitor and had her name printed on it.  


“Ms. Carter’s room is number two-thirty-one,” he said and gestured towards his left, “the stairs are the second left in that direction. On the second floor you’ll make a left, the room is on your right.”  


“Thanks,” Stella answered as she peeled the sticker off its backing to place it on the upper left side of her chest. She smiled at the receptionist one last time and turned to find the stairs.  


The stairs were not quite what she expected. She had been in enough public buildings in the 21st century to expect concrete or rubber-lined steps. These were the kind of well-worn wood which she might have expected before the war. They creaked just a little as she walked, the way that old wood always did after a while.  


At the second landing there was a hallway going both ways down the length of the building. It was a surprisingly wide hallway given the age of the building, and there were doors all the way up and down the hallway. Stella passed a nurse in scrubs carrying a basket full of folded linens as she walked down the hall looking for room 231.  


As she passed room 229, Stella could hear voices from the next door down.  


“You’ve got a special visitor on the way up,” was the chirpy voice of a young woman.  


“Oh, did Gabe’s grandson finally decide to pay me a real visit then?” was the crisp voice which Stella would recognize anywhere, even with the unfamiliar tremor of age. “The boy seems to think that monthly calls are a suitable replacement for visits.”  


“No, even better than Mr. Triplett,” the nurse replied cheerfully.  


“Oh, my daughter then?” Peggy asked her voice bright and hopeful, “I know she’s busy, but I wish she could visit a little more often.”  


“Nope,” the nurse replied popping the ‘p’, “It’s been even longer since you saw this guest.”  


Peggy made a soft ‘hmm’ing noise, which Stella almost missed as she stopped outside of 231.  


“I suppose it could be my nephew then? He pays for my care and forgets to visit except for maybe once a year,” Peggy considered.  


Stella knocked on the door, which was slightly ajar, and within seconds the nurse was pulling the door wide open. Stella barely even acknowledged the nurse, because sitting at the little table near the window was Peggy herself.  


“Oh,” Peggy said softly, the only sound she seemed capable of as the nurse bustled out of the room and pulled the door most of the way shut behind her. Peggy and Stella just stared at each other for a long moment before Peggy was struggling to her feet and Stella was rushing forward to help her and suddenly they had their arms wrapped around each other tightly. Stella could feel warm tears as Peggy cried into Stella’s shirt.  


“I saw the news, but I couldn’t believe it,” Peggy finally cried into Stella’s shirt. “My Stella, my girl, not dead, but sleeping the whole time.”  


“I woke up and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t dead either,” Stella admitted into Peggy’s gray hair.  


Peggy finally pulled away from Stella a little and softly pushed Stella into the other chair at the table. Stella got Peggy seated in her own chair before finally taking the other seat. Stella had missed it before, but there was a pot of tea on the table along with two mugs, a tiny jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar. So Stella started fixing Peggy a cup of tea, exactly as Peggy had taught her in 1943: very milky and with a tiny spoon of sugar.  


Peggy took the cup with a smile and took the time to really look Stella up and down.  


“You should really wear soft colors more often,” Peggy sighed as she took in the deep navy color of her shirt and the dark jeans.  


“I know, I have plenty now,” Stella replied softly as she poured a cup for herself.  


“Good, I know you’re a little shy about these things, but I really think you should consider a new wardrobe, to fit you, instead of the Captain,” Peggy told her. Peggy was speaking softly, she knew she was talking about a secret, and Stella felt sure that it was a secret which wouldn’t leave this room without Stella’s permission.  


“I’ve thought about it,” Stella admitted. She was drinking in every detail of Peggy, and of the room around her. Peggy had aged gracefully for the sheer number of years piled onto her. Her hair was all gray, and her faced was well-lined, but she was still sitting upright, and her hands didn’t tremble on the mug at all.  


“And that’s all I would ask you to do,” Peggy replied calmly. “I suppose I should update you on my life since 1945?”  


“If you wouldn’t mind,” Stella answered with a soft smile. Peggy grinned and began speaking of the end of the war, of the SSR, of SHIELD, of Howard, of Jarvis, of Angie.  


They drank the whole pot of tea and were still talking when a nurse came by hours later to check on Peggy. The nurse had Stella step out of the room in order to get Peggy moved into the bed for a while, and to clean up the tea things.  


When the nurse let Stella back in, Peggy was sitting up in bed and looking out the window. As Stella pushed the door shut again behind her, Peggy turned to look at her. She grinned brightly and turned more fully to look at Stella.  


“Oh good, I was afraid you were going to be so late the boys would beat you here,” Peggy said and started reaching blindly in the top drawer of the bedside table. “I mean, I know Colonel Phillips was insistent on that meeting, but it rather meant that Howard and James were left to their own devices all afternoon. God knows what those two got up to without us.”  


Stella could pinpoint the day Peggy was lost in. Bucky and Howard had indeed gotten into trouble without Stella or Peggy to supervise. They had blown up a lab, and had beaten Stella to Peggy’s apartment, covered in soot and with Howard’s left eyebrow completely fried off.  


“Where did I put that damn lipstick?” Peggy asked frustrated as she dug into the drawer with more energy. She banged her elbow into the bedframe and looked up sharply at Stella. “I lost the moment didn’t I?”  


\--  


On Stella’s fourth visit to see Peggy, she perhaps a little more emotionally injured than normal. She had, after all, just spent the morning in the Smithsonian watching videos of Peggy and the Howlies talking about her and their relationships during the war.  


So when Peggy lost the moment in the middle of her visit, it hurt even more than normal. So Peggy and Stella were both crying messes for half the visit before they could compose themselves again, and by then it was almost time for visiting hours to end. So Stella said her goodbyes and hopped on her motorcycle to make her way back to her apartment in the city. It was late enough that most of the rush hour traffic was fading off, and the majority was on its way out of the city anyways.  


Stella found herself veering off from her familiar path and stopping at the VA center. She wasn’t sure why she had done it until she found herself asking for Sam at the front desk. She followed the directions and found herself standing in the open doorway where a group of vets were talking about their experiences.  


Stella waited until the session was over, and caught Sam’s eyes. He came over with a cocky smile and Stella felt that jolt of attraction again, which she didn’t know what to do with.  


“Look who it is,” Sam greeted, “The running man.”  


“Caught the last few minutes. It's pretty intense,” Stella said quietly. She didn’t know how to deal with PTSD, even though she was fairly certain that was what was keeping her from sleeping most nights, and making it hard to reach out and make friends. Or maybe it was something else, she didn’t know.  


“Yeah, brother, we all got the same problems,” Sam answered serious now, “Guilt, regret.”  


“You lose someone?” Stella asked. She was curious, but also she had a feeling that Sam wanted to talk about it. Or maybe it was because she had just watched some of his session with the vets from this century, and she was picking up on how that kind of sharing happened.  


“My wingman, Riley. Fly in the night mission,” Sam answered, “A standard PJ rescue op, nothing we hadn't done a thousand times before, till RPG knock Riley's dumb ass out of the sky. Nothing I could do. It's like I was up there just to watch.”  


“I'm sorry,” Stella said, and it wasn’t sufficient, but she wasn’t sure there was anything sufficient for that kind of loss.  


“After that, I had really hard time finding a reason for being over there, you know?”  


“But you're happy now, back in the world?”  


“Hey, the number of people giving me orders is down to about zero. So, hell, yeah. You thinking about getting out?” Sam seemed okay, maybe that loss was older than the gaping and bleeding wound left after she lost everyone. Or maybe it was simply a smaller wound to begin with.  


“No,” Stella answered immediately. Then she thought, she almost turned Fury down, had thought about quitting more than once. And after finding out about Project Insight she was less enthusiastic than ever about working for SHIELD, “I don't know. To be honest, I don't know what I would do with myself if I did.”  


“Ultimate fighting?” Sam suggested and it shocked a little laugh out of Stella, “It's just a great idea off the top of my head. But seriously, you could do whatever you want to do. What makes you happy?”  


Stella thought about it for a moment and she didn’t have an answer. There was a time she might have said Bucky, or art, or Peggy, or even spending time working in the corner grocery store and getting to know the old ladies of the neighborhood. But all of that was gone or had lost its magic somehow. She still loved Peggy, but she was a different person now with a different life that she had lived separate from Stella. Art was more coping method than love.  


“I don't know,” Stella finally said. Sam had a slightly wounded look on his face, which faded before Stella could examine it. Maybe Sam could be the thing which made her happy. But was she even ready to be happy?  


\--  


Stella lived on the top floor of her building, and she chose to take the stairs up most days. Today she ran into Sharon on her way to her room. Sharon’s apartment was one of the smaller ones in the building, which didn’t have any washer or dryer hookups, so Sharon was on her way downstairs with her basket full of laundry.  


“You know, using my machine would probably be a lot cheaper,” Stella offered tentatively. Maybe she could make friends, and maybe Sharon could be one of them. She was hoping that she was ready to try at least.  


“And what would that cost me?” Sharon asked, and in that moment Stella realized that Sharon thought she was flirting. Which, it certainly sounded like flirting, didn’t it?  


“A cup of coffee?” Stella asked uncertain. Sharon smiled, but turned her down. Stella was just a little bit relieved. She wasn’t ready to start dating, and while Sharon was sweet, Stella was fairly certain she didn’t feel that way about her.  


“Oh, I think you left your radio on,” Sharon added as she started on her way down to the basement. And Stella knew that was wrong, because she never left anything on when she left the apartment. She was still too much a child of the depression to be comfortable spending any money more than necessary. She didn’t even leave her dishwasher running while she was out, because she almost never used the thing. She sat down to do the math, and typically it was less water and electricity to wash the dishes by hand.  


So when Stella opened her door she was ready for something to go down. What she wasn’t ready for was her boss sitting in her favorite reading chair and bleeding all over it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this chapter hurts a lot. I didn't really mean for that to happen, but it's the first part if CA:TWS, so what did you really expect? I mean Stella is hella depressed and she doesn't have the words to really express that. So, yeah, she's trying to deal and doesn't know how and it hurts.   
> BUT we see the start of some Stella/Sam shippiness??? So that's happy at least.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Nick Fury's nighttime visit to the Elevator before the fight

“I don't remember giving you a key,” Stella said as she thought about her apartment and tried to figure out if she left anything out that she wouldn’t want Fury to know about. Her computer was password protected, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think that would keep him out if he wanted a peek at Stella’s personal information. Thankfully she logged out of tumblr and twitter every time she left the website, and cleared her internet history every time she left the house. He probably wouldn’t have been motivated enough to even look that hard.  


“You really think I'd need one?” Fury asked. Then he continued, “My wife kicked me out.”  


Stella paused a moment. Fury hadn’t struck her as the domestic type, she finally spoke, “Didn't know you were married.”  


“There are a lot of things you don't about me,” Fury replied calmly. Either Fury had lost his mind and was confiding in Stella, or there was something else going on here.  


“I know, Nick. That's the problem,” Stella replied and switched on the light. She had thought Fury was hurt before, but he was covered in scratches and bleeding onto her chair. It had been a really nice chair and there was no way she was going to get the bloodstains out of that upholstery. Fury switched the light back off and put his finger to his lips in the universal sign for silence. Then started typing on his phone. Then he held it up so Stella could see what he had typed. It read: EARS EVERYWHERE.  


And Stella was incensed. She had cleared the apartment for bugs only the first week she had been living there, and hadn’t found anything in that time. But apparently Fury had gotten craftier since Stella had smashed all the bugs in her Brooklyn apartment and thrown them out the window onto the fire escape. And somehow she had trusted that Maria would make things work again in DC and no one would be listening in on her apartment.  


“I'm sorry to have do this, but I had no place else to crash,” Fury continued. He typed up another message and Stella found her blood boiling even harder. It read: SHIELD COMPROMISED.  


“Who else knows about your wife?” Stella asked and Fury typed up on his phone before speaking and showed that to her as well: YOU AND ME.  


“Just...my friends,” Fury said aloud.  


“Is that what we are?” Stella asked a little angry still.  


“That's up to you,” Fury replied, but anything Stella could have said was cut off by the sound of bullets ripping through the wall and into Fury. Stella went down and dragged Fury away from the window and into the next room before crouching over Fury. The man dug unsteadily in his pocket and pushed a flashdrive into Stella’s hand. It was familiar, Stella was half sure she had seen it before, but she couldn’t place it. Fury spoke again, “Don't...trust anyone.”  


Fury passed out just as she heard a crash and her neighbor yelling into the apartment, “Captain Rogers?” Sharon came around the corner with her gun up and her body language screaming that she was looking for the shooter, “Captain, I'm Agent 13 of SHIELD's Special Service.”  


“Sharon?” Stella asked incredulously looking up at the woman standing over her.  


“I'm assigned to protect you,” Sharon replied and scanned the windows again for an assailant.  


“On whose order?” Stella asked and Sharon finally looked down at Stella. Stella could see the exact moment the blonde woman noticed Fury on the ground, bleeding out on her floors.  


“His,” Sharon said before rushing down to check on Fury and check his pulse. Then she speaks into a radio, “Foxtrot is down, he's unresponsive. I need EMTs.”  


“Do you have a twenty on the shooter?” someone asked from the other side of the radio. Stella looked up through the window and caught sight of the shadowy figure on the roof opposite.  


“Tell them I'm in pursuit,” Stella said as she ran across the apartment and scooped up her shield on the way. She smashes though her own window and makes chase. The man has long dark hair, and is wearing both a mask and goggles. There was no way that Stella could possibly identify the man if she ever saw him again. She threw the shield, hoping to trip him up, slow him down. But he caught the shield with barely any effort. It was like he was catching a plastic Frisbee thrown with a child’s strength. It was then that Stella realized that the man’s arm seemed to be made out of metal. The man threw it back, and it the process of trying to catch it, Stella lost sight of the assassin. By the time she righted herself and looked over the edge of the building, he was long gone.  


\--  


Stella took the fire escape back down to ground level and walked the rest of the way to her apartment. When she got there, Sharon was climbing into the back of an ambulance where Fury had been loaded up on a gurney. There were no less than six SHIELD vehicles surrounding her building and there was no way she was getting back into her apartment through the front door, so she climbed up the fire escape and made her way in through the busted window she had jumped through less than twenty minutes ago. She grabbed up the keys to her motorcycle, her computer, her jacket and made her way back down the main stairs. She nodded at the SHIELD agents she passed, one made motions to stop her before they realized who she was. She locked her computer into the sidebag on her motorcycle and took her motor cycle to the nearest hospital, where she assumed Fury would have been taken.  


She was proven correct when she arrived and found a half dozen SHIELD vehicles in the lot. Stella was the first person actually allowed into the viewing area. The underling SHIELD agents hadn’t been allowed that close. But Natasha arrived shortly after Stella as the two of them watched through the window as a crowd of doctors, nurses, and ER surgeons tried to save Fury’s life.  


“Is he gonna make it?” Natasha asked after a moment of silence. She sounded worried, and her brow was furrowed. Natasha rarely let people see that much genuine emotion on her face. Stella was a little bit honored that she was one of Natasha’s chosen few.  


“I don't know,” Stella replied honestly. The man had been in an awful condition when he showed up in Stella’s apartment. She could only assume that with the bullet wounds he could only be worse than he was.  


“Tell me about the shooter,” Natasha demanded, and Stella wondered about her relationship with the man. Natasha had never spoken to her about Fury, but Stella wondered now just how close they had been. Natasha was torn up seeing the man laid out in the operating room, but Stella knew better than to try and comfort her.  


“He's fast and strong,” Stella started and realized that there was only one identifying thing she could say about him, “He had a metal arm.”  
Maria came up onto Stella’s other side and watched through the window as well. Stella hadn’t seen the woman since she moved down to DC, and assumed that she worked almost exclusively in the New York office. Or on the Helicarrier in emergency situations.  


“Ballistics?” Natasha asked, and Stella knew that question wasn’t aimed at her. Stella wouldn’t have known and she hadn’t thought to ask.  


“Three slugs. No rifling and completely untraceable,” Maria answered. None of them had looked away from the window. It was as though if they looked away Fury was disappear into the ether.  


“Soviet made?” Natasha inquired. Stella realized that Natasha knew something then. She hadn’t asked for the make, but rather asked for an affirmation of something she already knew.  


“Yeah,” Maria replied just as the machines inside the room in front of them changed in tone. They watched the doctors try to stop his readings from flatlining.  


“Don't do this to me, Nick,” Natasha demanded softly. She was talking to herself and to Fury, but it was the first time Stella realized that Natasha knew the man well enough to use his first name.  


The doctors tried a defibrillator twice before trying different drugs. Fury continued to drop and Natasha continued muttering at the window, “Don't do this to me, Nick. Don't do this to me.”  


Finally they called his death at 1:03 in the morning. Stella looked away from the window. Nick Fury was dead.  


She had never been a particular fan of the man, but he hadn’t deserved to die. There were very few people Stella could look at and say they absolutely deserved to die. Fury hadn’t been one of them. She doesn’t agree with Project Insight, she’s still not sure how she feels about the Avengers Initiative, and she fully hates the compartmentalization that SHIELD runs on. She and Fury might never have really been friends, but he shouldn’t have died today.  


Stella pretended she didn’t notice the way Natasha’s face crumbled as they started cleaning up the room and Fury’s body in order to wheel him away. She did help Maria lead Natasha out of the room. By the time they made it into the hallway Natasha had put herself back together in the way that only a talented actress, or one of the world’s greatest super-spies would be capable of.  


A nurse lead them into a nearby room and told them that Fury’s body would be brought in for a short viewing before being moved to the morgue until his body was claimed and moved to be readied for burial.  


Fury’s body was wheeled in while Maria was making arrangements with the doctors to figure out how to get him transported and looking for his legal paperwork to figure out if he had made any funeral arrangements prior to his death.  


Once the doors closed behind the nurse who wheeled the gurney in, Natasha’s façade cracked again. Stella stood near the door and let Natasha cry. When the doors open again it was to let Maria back into the room.  


“We need to take him,” Maria said softly, more to Stella than Natasha. Natasha didn’t make a movement. Stella knew the other woman had probably heard Maria, but also knew that she wasn’t going to react until it was to her benefit.  


Stella stepped forward and gently set her hand on Natasha’s shoulder. Natasha didn’t move.  


“Natasha,” Stella said her voice gentle in deference to Natasha’s pain. Natasha touched Fury’s forehead tenderly and turned away and walked out, shrugging Stella’s hand off her shoulder in the process. Stella followed her out into the hallway, “Natasha!”  


“Why was Fury in your apartment?” Natasha asked as she turned to look at Stella.  


“I don't know,” Stella said softly. They were in a public place and Stella was suddenly unsure just how much she could trust her. Before Fury came into her apartment and demanded that she trust no one, she would have told Natasha everything. Even after the Lemurian Star, Stella had trusted Natasha to have her back, even if she didn’t trust her to stay on mission anymore. Before Natasha could say anything in reply, Rumlow was approaching and they were both smart enough to clam up.  


“Captain, they want you back at SHIELD,” Rumlow said calmly. It was an order more than anything else, and Stella wasn’t very keen to follow it.  


“Yeah, give me a second,” Stella replied dismissively.  


“They want you now,” Rumlow said impatiently.  


“Okay,” Stella replied sharply and Rumlow finally turned to step away. Stella turned back to Natasha, who was trying very hard to put on her regular smirk.  


“You're a terrible liar,” Natasha said and walked off away from where the SHIELD agents were waiting on Stella.  


Stella shoved her hands into her pockets and realized that she still had Fury’s flashdrive in her pocket. She caught sight of the vending machine and the packs of gum were exactly the same size as the flashdrive. She stepped to the side and forced the door open. She pushed the flashdrive into the machine behind the row of gum. It would be safe there for a little while until she could deal with whatever was going on at SHIELD.  


As Stella left the hospital Rumlow attempted to insist that she ride back to the Triskelion with STRIKE Team Alpha. Stella wasn’t even fully trusting Natasha, and they had a connection, the other woman knew most of Stella’s most important secrets. There was no way she was trusting Rumlow, for all that they had worked together, they had never been friends. A couple of shared jokes didn’t make the man a Howlie.  


So Stella took her bike. Every agent stationed at the Triskelion had an assigned parking area, not a specific spot necessarily (those were just for department heads and people like Fury, Hill, and Pierce at the top of the food chain). Stella’s area was prime parking territory, it was the motorcycle parking on the third floor of the garage, which had a walkthrough into the main bullpen for STRIKE Team offices. Stella was fairly positive that she had gotten preferential parking because she was Captain America. But on long days after longer missions, she had appreciated the perfect parking space.  


\--  


“Are you sure you’re fine?” Hill asked with unusual carefulness. Maria Hill was not known for her tenderness, and she was even less known for checking up on agents, not even the ones who had gotten the shit knocked out of them on the last mission.  


“I’ll get home alright,” Stella answered.  


The fact was that she wasn’t fine. She was feeling still and sore in places she couldn’t remember feeling this sore since back-alley fights in the thirties. Whoever that guy had been, he had sure been able to pack a punch. A punch that sent Stella through a solid wall, and into an even more solid concrete foundation. She healed fast, but it hadn’t even been an hour since Rumlow had put a bullet through the man’s skull while Stella tried to pull herself up.  


“That’s not what I asked,” Hill replied, her voice wasn’t sharp, but Stella knew it was an admonishment, “But I’ll let you get away with it. Take the full week off, I know you’ll be better in a couple hours, but take the week anyways.”  


“There’s a planned mission for Tuesday though, they’ll need me,” Stella protested half-heartedly. It was an information gathering mission more than anything else, and Stella mostly hated those missions. There was something about stealing information, pretending to be someone she wasn’t that hit just a little too close to home to be tolerable.  


“Rumlow will just have to put on his big boy pants and do it without the man with a plan,” Hill replied with a kind of calm snark that Stella had pegged as Natasha’s default, and perhaps the two lady spies had taught it to each other.  


Stella allowed herself a small smile and wondered again if it would someday be possible for her and Maria to be real friends instead of this pseudo-friends/coworkers arrangement they had going.  


“Alright,” Maria said a little more firmly, “get home, and don’t let me see you at work for a week.”  


“I’ll see you in a week then,” Stella replied and smiled a little more firmly. She had to force it to stay in place when she turned to leave and the strained and bruised muscles of her back and hips.  


Thank god her ride was just a few meters away.  


\--  


When Stella met up with Rumlow and the team, one of them promptly handed Stella over to a junior agent to pass her along to Secretary Pierce. It was probably said more politely or more correctly or whatever, but Rumlow passed the responsibility to get her where she was ordered to be, to a junior agent, who disappeared the moment Secretary Pierce was in sight.  


Pierce was in the middle of some conversation with Sharon.  


Stella didn’t know how she was feeling about Sharon right now. The woman had been spying on her, even if it was supposedly for her own protection, and even if it had been on orders. And had Fury distrusted her so much that she couldn’t even be informed that there was someone protecting her? He couldn’t have told her who was protecting her? Sharon couldn’t have told her who she was?  


“For whatever it's worth, you did your best,” Pierce was saying as Stella came into hearing range.  


“Thank you, sir,” Sharon replied and turned around to leave Pierce. As she turned her eyes caught Stella’s, and they widened just the tiniest amount. Stella wouldn’t have even noticed if she didn’t spend as much time with Natasha as she did. Sharon nodded in a businesslike way and greeted her with a simple, “Captain Rogers.”  


“Neighbor,” Stella replied a little coldly. Maybe Stella would get over that betrayal soon, but right now it was a little fresh.  


“Ah, Captain,” Pierce said as he caught sight of Stella. He was smiling, but something about the smile didn’t seem quite right, and Stella couldn’t put her finger on just what. Pierce continued as he lifted his hand in an offer to shake hands, “I'm Alexander Pierce.”  


“Sir, it's an honor,” Stella replied as she took his hand and shook it. And meeting the Secretary of Defense for the United States of America really was an honor. But then meeting the President a few weeks after the Battle of New York had been an honor as well.  


\--  


Stella was in the process of permanently moving down to DC when she got a letter in the mail at her apartment in Brooklyn. She had been in DC for the last week and a half, and hadn’t gotten around to forwarding her mail just yet. It was the kind of letter where even the envelope looked impressive. It was the thick cream colored paper that wedding invitations always seemed to be printed on, and someone had taken the time to handwrite the address, although the return address was what caught her eye:  


Matthew Ellis  
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  
Washington, DC 20500  


The president of the United States of America had sent her a letter. The _president_.  


Stella was more careful opening that letter than she had even been in the history of her life. That included letters from Bucky after he was shipped overseas and before Stella got herself onto the front lines as well.  


Stella used her pocket knife to slit open the top of the envelope and she carefully slipped the letter out. It was printed on the same kind of high quality paper, but it was a typed letter with only a loopy signature on the bottom to indicate that anyone had taken a look at the final printed letter. Because that signature was actually written onto the page, it was indented in the thick paper, like he was used to needing to press hard with half-dead pens.  


The letter was short, just a couple of sentences.  


_Dear Captain Steven Rogers,  
_

_You are cordially invited to a small intimate dinner on the 14th of October. Please call to confirm your presence or to decline the invitation.  
_

_We look forward to seeing you,  
_

_Matthew Ellis_  


Stella sat herself down hard into the kitchen chair which was one of the few remaining pieces of furniture in the apartment. She was invited to dinner. At the White House. With the President.  


By the time Stella managed to move enough to reach for her phone, almost an hour had passed. But it was still only two in the afternoon, and well within normal hours to call someone. So Stella dialed the number under the President’s signature and let the phone ring for a minute. Eventually a voice answered it.  


“President Ellis, who is this?” it was the president. Stella was suddenly understanding the way teenage girls squealed over meeting their favorite actors.  


“Captain Rogers, sir,” Stella fumbled out after a short pause.  


“Ah, good, I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t hear from you,” Ellis said with some significant amount of cheer in his voice.  


“I apologize, sir. I’m in the middle of moving apartments, and I hadn’t forwarded my mail yet,” Stella explained as she pulled herself together. If she could pretend to punch an actor in the face in front of a couple thousand people, she could hold a conversation with one man. Even if he was the President.  


“Oh, it’s no problem at all,” Ellis replied breezily. It occurred to Stella then that it was normal business hours right now, he had probably been working.  


“Well, I wanted to call to confirm that I will be able to make it to dinner on the 14th,” Stella said getting down to the actual business of the call.  


“Excellent,” Ellis exclaimed cheerfully, “It will be a small gathering. Feel free to bring a date or a friend, I’ll be bringing my family, and the VP will be there with his family as well.”  
Did that man just say that she was not only meeting the President, but also the _Vice_ President? Stella was never going to recover from this phone call was she? Nope this was going to be one of those conversations which will stay with her until the day she dies. She can feel it now.

\--  


Of course the President had rather famously greeted her in the private dining room by saying, “Welcome Back, Cap,” in front of his secretary, who then told the press and anyone else who would listen. And Melanie had put it on the wall in the exhibit, for reasons which Stella could not begin to fathom.  


Pierce brought Stella’s attention back to the current moment by speaking, “The honor is mine, Captain. My father served in the 101st. Come on in.” Pierce lead the way into the office behind him. It was a huge office, and reminded Stella of Fury’s. The way things were at the highest tech they could manage for an office mostly. Of course Stella was sure that Stark’s office was probably some awful futuristic place where it seemed like there was no wood left in the world. Pierce picked up a photo of Fury and Pierce off his desk and offered it to Stella, “That photo was taken five years after Nick and I met. When I was at State Department in Bogota. ELN rebels took the embassy, and security got me out, but the rebels took hostages. Nick was deputy chief for the SHIELD station there. And he comes to me with a plan. He wants to storm the building through the sewers. I said, "No, we'll negotiate." Turned out the ELN didn't negotiate, so they put out a kill order. They stormed the basement, and what did they find? They find it empty. Nick had ignored my direct order and carried out an unauthorized military operation on foreign soil. He saved the lives of a dozen political officers, including my daughter.”  


Stella wasn’t sure why Pierce had told her the story, but it also sounded like Fury. Fury had, after all, disobeyed direct orders from the World Security Council last year during the Battle of New York, and told Stark about the nuke. Stella was fairly sure, after working with the man for a year, that Fury wouldn’t have allowed the missile to be launched if there was anything that he could have done about it.  


“So you gave him a promotion,” Stella said calmly. It wasn’t quite a question, although it was the question Stella wanted to ask.  


“I've never had any cause to regret it,” Pierce replied, answering the question Stella didn’t quite ask. But then he fired back with a question of his own, “Captain, why was Nick in your apartment last night?”  


“I don't know,” Stella answered truthfully. She really didn’t know why he had been there, although she suspected that the data stick was probably a large part of it.  


“You know it was bugged?” Pierce asked and Stella felt her blood heating again at the fact that her apartment had been bugged. But she also wasn’t about to throw a man she had respected under the bus.  


“I did, because Nick told me,” Stella replied with all the calm she could manage. She thought it was a little impressive considering just how angry she was.  


“Did he tell you he was the one who bugged it?” Pierce asked and Stella suddenly understood why Fury couldn’t trust Pierce. There was something in the way he was working to discredit Fury in Stella’s eyes which was fishy to some special extreme. Eventually when the silence had stretched just past Pierce’s comfort zone he spoke again, “I want you to see something.” He then clicked away for a moment before a feed of Batroc and a SHIELD agent was showing on the wall, which was in itself a huge screen.  


“Who hired you, Batroc?” The SHIELD agent in the feed asked and Stella realized something. Batroc had gotten away, which meant that this was very very recent. Possibly even live.  


“Is that live?” Stella asked without taking her eyes from the screen.  


“Yeah, they picked him up last night in a not-so-safe house in Algiers,” Pierce answered. The longer Stella stood in this room with Pierce the less she trusted him.  


“Are you saying he's a suspect?” Stella asked more than a little confused. “Assassination isn't Batroc's line.”  


“No, it's more complicated than that,” Pierce answered with a gleam in his eyes that Stella really hated, “Batroc was hired anonymously to attack the Lemurian Star and he was contacted by e-mail and paid by wire transfer. And then the money was run through seventeen fictitious accounts, the last one going to a holding company that was registered to a Jacob Veech.”  


“Am I supposed to know who that is?” Stella asked and she knew her voice was growing defensive, but for all of Fury’s secrets he was dead, and Pierce was running around in circles instead of just giving her the answers that she needed. Pierce handed over a file and Stella flipped it open as a way to keep her hands busy more than anything else.  


“Not likely,” Pierce answered with an obnoxious little shrug that made Stella want to punch the man in the face, “Veech died six years ago. His last address was 1435 Elmhurst Drive. When I first met Nick his mother lived at 1437.”  


“Are you saying Fury hired the pirates? Why?” Stella demanded. The man hadn’t even been dead 12 hours and Pierce was poking around and accusing a dead man of things which Stella was fairly sure he wouldn’t have done.  


“Well the prevailing theory was that the hijacking was a cover for the acquisition and sale of classified intelligence. The sale went sour and that led to Nick's death,” Pierce replied.  


“If you really knew Nick Fury you know that's not true,” she retorted.  


“Why do you think we're talking? See, I took a seat on the Council not because I wanted to but because Nick asked me to, because we were both realists. We knew that despite all the diplomacy and the handshaking and the rhetoric, that to build a really better world sometimes means having to tear the old one down. And that makes enemies. Those people that call you dirty because you got the guts to stick your hands in the mud and try to build something better. And the idea that those people could be happy today, makes me really, really angry,” Pierce was monologging again and Stella didn’t have the patience for that kind of thing. She’d really rather just punch him. After a short pause Pierce continued, “Captain, you were the last one to see Nick alive. I don't think that's an accident, and I don't think you do either. So I'm gonna ask again, why was he there?”  


“He told me not to trust anyone,” Stella answered. She felt it was a suitably Romanoff-ian answer. It was a threat and also the truth.  


“I wonder if that included him,” Pierce replied. Stella was sure that Pierce thought he didn’t sound smug, but that smugness was all she could hear.  


“I'm sorry. Those were his last words. Excuse me,” Stella finally said and picked up her shield off the floor. She turned her back on Pierce with a kind of deliberateness and made to leave the office. But of course Pierce wasn’t going to let her leave with the last word.  


“Captain,” Pierce called to her. Stella stopped and turned to look at him. As much as she currently despised the man he was still the Secretary of Defense and she was technically working for him. Pierce continued, “Somebody murdered my friend and I'm gonna find out why. Anyone gets in my way, they're gonna regret it. Anyone.”  


“Understood,” Stella said calmly and turned again to leave. This time Pierce didn’t try to stop her. She walked down the short hallway and got onto the elevator. As much a fan of cardio as she might be, 30 or more levels of stairs were just a little excessive.  


When the elevator arrived, Stella stepped onto it and told the computer system her level, “Operations control.”  


“Confirmed,” the computer replied but just before the doors closed Rumlow slipped in with two other STRIKE team agents.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I moved where I was going to end this chapter like six times. I was working on the chapter, and that seemed like a good place to stop for now. We all know where the next scene is going to start, so I figured it wasn't a cliff-hanger for you guys.  
> Also I did borrow quite a bit of dialogue from the movie for this chapter, and I will probably do the same for the next chapter and probably the one after that as well. It's starting to look like CA:TWS is going to take up at least three chapters, and probably four or five...  
> This series is a giant monster in my mind, and now this story is starting to take on those monstrous proportions as well...


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the Elevator Scene to the drive to New Jersey

“All STRIKE personal on site,” Rumlow was saying as he slipped in before the doors closed.  


“Understood,” one of the agents replied and right on his heels the other agent replied with a firm, “Yes, sir.”  


“Forensics,” Rumlow said into the elevator’s computer and the computer confirmed his level and the doors slid shut.  


“Cap,” Rumlow acknowledged simply. Stella nodded calmly before responding.  


“Rumlow,” Stella said as the elevator started to descend.  


Stella had mostly gotten used to these elevators, but she still thought it was strange that a building which housed one of the world’s largest spy organizations would have glass elevators on the outside of the building. If it had been one or the other perhaps she could have understood it, but with both things being true it really didn’t make any sense.  


“Evidence response found some fibers on the roof they want us to see. You want me to get the tac-team ready?” Rumlow asked as he turned slightly to face Stella. Rumlow was in charge of STRIKE Team Alpha, but somehow anytime she was involved in a mission she was expected to take lead. It wasn’t all that upsetting, just odd. She could fit into the chain of command as easily as the next soldier, but no one ever expected her to do so.  


“No,” Stella replied steadily. She wasn’t really ready to go after this guy, he had caught the shield and tossed it back at her with enough force that she couldn’t catch it easily. There weren’t a lot of people she knew of who could do something like that. Mostly just Thor or the Hulk, really. “Let’s wait and see what it is first.”  


“Right,” Rumlow answered simply. His hand was on his gun at his hip. Stella eyed the gun carefully. The safety was on, but the holster wasn’t clipped all the way. Agents weren’t really supposed to carry their weapons inside the building, but it was a rule that Stella had never seen enforced. Most STRIKE agents carried their weapons out of the locker rooms and training rooms, and no one had ever tried to stop Stella from carrying the shield or Natasha from wearing her widow’s bites.  


As Stella moved her eyes from Rumlow’s gun the elevator coasted to a stop and the door slid open to admit more agents onto it. The elevator was starting to feel full if not totally crowded. One of the agents brushed backwards and knocked slightly against Stella, he muttered a soft, “Excuse me,” and turned away from her.  


Rumlow started speaking to Stella again, “Um...sorry about what happened with Fury. Messed up what happened to him.”  


Stella paused before she replied. She hadn’t been particularly close to Fury, so she wasn’t completely sure why Rumlow was giving her condolences. She responded with a simple, “thank you,” anyways. Stella looked around the elevator at the agents sharing the tight space with them. One of the men in front of her was sweating, which wasn’t that unusual considering the fact that the elevator was full, but the A/C was running full blast, and even in the hot Virginia summer, someone working on the upper floors shouldn’t be sweating like that.  


As another agent asked for a floor Stella realized exactly what was going on. She had been completely surrounded by agents. At least half of them were STRIKE agents, who were the elite fighting agents, and she had only sparred against a couple of them. She didn’t know any of their fighting styles and by this point she was suddenly sure that there was going to be a fight here in this elevator.  


“Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?” Stella asked as calmly as she could manage. No one moved for about half a second before one of the agents in front of her turned and struck her with a stun baton and hands from other sides were grabbing hold of her arms in an attempt to get them trapped into a magnetic cuff. She knocked some of them off, but one of them had gotten half of the cuff onto her arms. She had dealt with the magnetic cuffs, and if she couldn’t get it off she was in for a lot of trouble. They were developed to be strong enough to keep the Hulk down (although they had never actually been tested on him, it was all theoretical since no one had yet dared to try and get past Stark security to ask Bruce Banner to let the Hulk out in order to run tests). Stella got the cuff off and knocked out a couple more agents before turned to take Rumlow down.  


“Woh, big guy,” Rumlow said looking a little cocky. And wasn’t that just awful that she was ‘a big guy’? That someone would think to call her that. She ached for the days when she fought for air sometimes but she was small enough to fit under Bucky’s chin. Rumlow continued speaking, “I just want you to know, Cap, this ain't personal.”  


Rumlow had a stun baton as well, and turned to shock her with it. She grappled with him for a minute before she managed to knock Rumlow out.  


“It kind of feels personal,” Stella said looking at the pile of knocked out agents on the floor of the elevator. Getting to her bike was going to be a lot more complicated now. Stella scooped her shield up from the floor where it had fallen and she pried open the elevator only to find herself faced with another team of STRIKE agents. They all had weapons out and pointed at her.  


“Drop the shield! Put your hands in the air!” The agent in the lead ordered and Stellla stared at them for a half a second before smashed her shield into the wires for the elevator which dropped the elevator downwards. She pried the door open on the other floor only to find another team of STRIKE agents outside the door. She let it close back and looked around herself.  


If they had agents on multiple floors guarding the door for the elevator, then that meant that they would be able to mobilize agents onto any floor she tried. She could fight off a dozen or so agents, but there was no way she was going to be able to do it over and over again as half of the building tried to take her down. She looked behind her and realized that there was really only one way for her to get out of this elevator. She sighed, and looked down to see the glass-ceilinged lobby below her.  


“I’m an idiot,” She muttered softly to herself under her breath as she pulled the shield in front of her and launched herself through the window and kept her shield below heer as she plummeted downwards. At least she was less likely to cut herself to pieces with the shield in front of her. And even if she did, cuts like that would heal fast enough if she could get the shield to take most of the impact. If not she wasn’t getting out of this. If she broke an arm or a leg or her neck, she wasn’t getting to her motorcycle she wasn’t leaving the Triskelion.  


She managed the fall and although she knew that every inch of her was covered in bruises she was whole enough that she could pull herself upright and drag herself into a run towards the garage. Now her bike wasn’t in such a great location since it was on the third floor, but she was faster than any other agent SHIELD had, so she managed to get to her bike before anyone else. She was climbing on when she saw agents come out of the entrance from the garage into the building main. She dropped her helmet and got her bike going as fast as she dared. She was zooming out onto the bridge in less than a minute.  


Even with how fast she got her bike out and going they had managed to start laying out obstacles on the bridge, and as she skidded around them she caught sight of a Quinjet pulling up over the bridge.  


The pilot of the jet called out for her to stand down, and lowered its gun. She didn’t stand down and revved up her bike instead. She threw her shield into the propellers on one of the wings and she jumped up off her bike to pull the jet down. She smashed her shield into some of the more critical points and as the jet started to go downwards she jumped off and landed with a roll right next to her bike. She got it moving again in seconds and drove over the blockade and into the city.  


\--  


Stella had never been more appreciative of her friendship with Natasha than she was as she reflexively dodged CCTV cameras and drove her bike into the city to the safe house Natasha had set up for her.  


Natasha had insisted that Stella have a safe place away from the prying eyes of SHIELD and pseudo-friends. Natasha had never outright admitted it, but Stella had the feeling that the other woman had a collection of similar safe houses throughout the city, and made use of them on a regular basis.  


This one was in the middle of a suburban area on the opposite side of the city from the Triskelion, and Stella had only made use of it twice. Once to stock it the way she really wanted to use the safehouse and the second time to enjoy a place where she knew no one but Natasha knew where it was.  


\--  


Stella was staring at a closet with exactly three outfits. She had bought all three of them online with excessive measuring to check that everything would fit. She had delivered the boxes to the safehouse only two weeks ago and the clothes inside had stayed in those boxes for those two weeks.  


The sky blue summer dress was a little wrinkled, but nothing that a fast press with an iron wouldn’t fix. Stella found her hands were just a little unsteady as she pulled the dress from the hanger.  


The dress fit her dimensions perfectly but Stella found herself staring in the mirror a little unsure. The skirt flowed around her legs just right, soft and a little full. The color set off her eyes just right, and Stella found herself smiling into the mirror.  


Maybe she would let her hair grow out just a little, not so long that people at work would question, but enough that she could maybe curl it just a little, maybe. She turned in front of the mirror just a little and tilted her head, she let herself smile and watched the way her eyes crinkled up at the corners. For just a moment she could see herself, who she was without the shield and the spy work and everything else.  


Maybe after the Stella Memorial day she would find some makeup. Maybe she’d actually go out of the house all dressed up as herself.  


\--  


Stella pulled the bike into the garage and shut the door behind her quickly. Once things were shut again she pulled her computer out and let herself into the house. For once a safehouse was a literal house. Through the garage door was a living room which bled into a dining area and then into the kitchen. It was barely furnished with a couch, a chair, a coffee table and a small two-seater dining table. She set the computer into the couch and went up the stairs without pausing on the lower floor. There was very little in the way of food inside the kitchen, and all of it was the kind of stuff that would stay edible for months or years. None of it would be very appetizing, and she wasn’t that hungry anyways.  


Upstairs were three bedrooms and one bathroom. Only one of the bedrooms had anything in it. Even then it was the cheapest full-sized bed Stella had ever encountered and three outfits in the closet. She immediately grabbed hold of the light hooded jacket from the fall outfit she had put together. It was meant to be fitted, and it didn’t look at all masculine, but it would work for now as a temporary disguise. She needed to get back to the hospital to get that data stick back and find out just what was on it which was so important that Fury’s last action had been to make sure it ended up in Stella’s hands.  


Stella left her bike in the garage and locked the safehouse behind her as she left. She walked the two blocks to the subway station and got on the train with her head down and leaning against a pole. If there were cameras watching (and there almost always were), she didn’t want to get spotted before she reached her destination. While she might have managed hiding from the cameras on the way to the safehouse, it was because Natasha had specifically taken her through those streets, and pointed out every permanent camera and how to watch for someone recording with their phones.  
Stella had never learned the route to any of the hospitals, and she just hoped that she could make it there without getting spotted.  


She seemed to have managed up until she got to the vending machine. At least, no one had caught up with her. If she had been spotted no one had been sent on her tail. But when she looked into the vending machine, the row of gum she had hidden the drive behind was empty, and the drive was missing. She was about to freak out when she heard the snap of bubble gum popping behind her. For a moment as she turned she was so angry, she barely even processed that the person behind her was Natasha herself.  


By the time Stella had started to come back to herself, she had Natasha pushed up against a wall in an empty adjacent room.  


“Where is it?” Stella demanded. She wasn’t trying to be abrupt but she had fled her workplace, seen her boss die, and made use of her safehouse to actually keep herself safe in the last 24 hours. In the last 12 hours.  


She felt like she had a right to be a little stressed out.  


“Safe,” Natasha replied stiffly. And Stella realized she had actually scared the other woman. Stella had never seen her scared, and only once in their relationship did Stella know that Natasha had been scared. Stella eased back just a little.  


“Where did you get it?” Natasha asked getting more comfortable. Stella hesitated. She really wanted to trust Natasha, she felt like she should have trusted her from the very beginning, but suddenly she hesitated again. Fury told her not to trust anyone.  


“Why would I tell you?” Stella asked trying to soften her voice. In the process she heard it getting reflexively higher. She cringed inwardly, now was not the time, even if Natasha already knew.  


“Fury gave it to you,” Natasha replied. Her voice was softer now. At least they were quiet enough not to be overheard by someone walking by, “Why?”  


“What's on it?” Stella asked softly. Natasha met her eyes before replying.  


“I don't know,” Natasha said then paused, she quirked her mouth upward into the signature smirk of hers, “I only act like I know everything, Rogers.”  


“I bet you knew Fury hired the pirates,” Stella said even more softly. Her voice was almost a whisper before it turned accusing, “didn't you?”  


“Well, it makes sense,” Natasha’s eyes were the only part of her face that betrayed any surprise. Even then it was the most minute of flickers, which was gone before Stella could categorize it. “The ship was dirty, Fury needed a way in, so do you.”  


“What was on that drive, Natasha?” Stella asked again. She was more firm now, she needed to know what Fury died for.  


“I know who killed Fury,” Natasha admitted, “Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists, the ones who do call him the Winter Soldier. He's credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years.”  


“So he's a ghost story,” Stella replied. Her voice was gentle now. There was history here, there was something Natasha wasn’t saying, something to do with the things Natasha never said, the secrets she held so deep inside her that Stella had only ever gotten the barest glimpse of the depths.  


“Five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran, somebody shot at my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff, I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me,” Natasha paused and pulled the bottom of her shirt up to reveal a nasty puckered scar on her abdomen, “A Soviet slag, no rifling. Bye-bye bikinis.”  


Stella smiled and replied, “Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now.”  


Natasha’s mouth quirked up in what was more smile than smirk.  


“Going after him is a dead end. I know, I've tried,” Natasha replied. There was history there, more of the depths Natasha never let anyone see. Maybe one day Stella would get to see those depths, but it wasn’t today. Natasha pulled the flash drive from her pocket and lifted it so Stella could see it, “Like you said, he's a ghost story.”  


Stella took the drive from Natasha’s hand before giving her a grim smile and replying, “Well, let's find out what the ghost wants.”  


\--  


Natasha had clearly had just as many safehouses as Stella had suspected, since she led Stella to a building not far from the hospital. It was fully furnished and looked like someone had been living there very recently. There were a couple of plates on a drying rack next to the sink, a light blanket was thrown over the edge of the couch, and a book had been left opened on the edge of the table.  
Perhaps since Fury’s death Natasha had spent that time trying to calm herself, pulling her impassive expression back on her face, looking for some real calm.  


Stella didn’t ask, simply followed Natasha into the back room where she pulled out a pile of men’s clothing and started shoving things in Stella’s direction. She took the military green jacket and the baseball cap, but rejected the rather absurd pants that were far too wide around the waist to really fit her.  


“It’s the fashion you know,” Natasha told her with a more playful version of her smirk.  


“I’ve done the research,” Stella replied with a raised eyebrow, “Maybe some people are still wearing it, but it was the big fashion ten years ago.”  


“It was worth a shot,” Natasha replied with a shrug before she pulled free a pair of skinny jeans.  


Stella eyed them for a second before shrugging and taking the pants as well. She gestured to the only real door in the apartment. The more public—seeming living areas were separated from the private ones by a wall with no actual door in it, behind that private living space was a single door in the wall, which lead to what Stella could only assume was the bathroom. Upon opening the door her suspicion was proven correct in the form of a simple, yet modern looking bathroom. It didn’t have any of the crazy kinds of showerheads or fancy sinks or toilets which did a lot more than toilets were designed for, but none of that surprised Stella. None of that was Natasha’s style.  


By the time Stella came out of the bathroom, Natasha had changed her clothes and pulled out a pair of large and thick-rimmed glasses. Stella took them with a face and enjoyed the look if mischievous enjoyment which suffused Natasha’s face as Stella put the glasses on her face.  


“The perfect hipster,” Natasha commented and pushed her hair away from her face. Stella had commented on more than one mission that it might be a good idea for Natasha to pull her hair back into a ponytail. On every occasion it had been met with derision and on one occasion with outright laughter. Stella had stopped suggesting.  


Natasha had a garage in the apartment building where she kept a car parked. One that was registered to a Mary Parque. Natasha thought she was clever sometimes, although Stella thought the joke with a car that was always parked, was just a little too obvious. But Stella would never tell the other woman that.  


Stella let Natasha get behind the driver’s seat and didn’t bother to ask where they were going. They needed to find out what was on that drive, and they both knew that no matter what kinds of firewalls Natasha had installed on their personal computers, it was far too risky to try and access the drive from their computers, and even more risky to try and use the wifi in Natasha’s safehouse.  


As it was, they were already barely three steps ahead of SHIELD, and no matter what they did, it was almost guaranteed that as soon as they tried to access the drive it would lead SHIELD right to them. So Stella wasn’t surprised when Natasha turned into the parking garage of a shopping mall. She didn’t know the whole plan yet, but she could see enough of it to know which direction they were headed in.  


As Natasha led her into the mall, she started reiterating things which she had told Stella before, if for different reasons and phrased in different ways.  


“First rule of going on the run is, don't run, walk,” Natasha told her as she set their pace, of just a little faster than a casual stroll. They looked like they were going somewhere, but not that they were in a hurry.  


“If I run in these shoes, they're gonna fall off,” Stella replied. The shoes in question were looser than she would have chosen of her own free will, but they fit the hipster disguise better than her own favorite tennis shoes would have. Natasha gently prodded her into the Apple Store and led her over to an open computer.  


“The drive has a level six homing program, so as soon as we boot up SHIELD will know exactly where we are,” Natasha told her calmly.  


“How much time do we have?” Stella asked as Natasha made herself comfortable in front of the laptop.  


“Uh...about nine minutes from...” Natasha said as she pulled the drive free and pushed it into the USB port on the laptop, “Now.” Natasha examined the screen for a minute as windows popped open on the screen. Natasha was working faster than Stella could even hope to try to keep up with. She might be on the right track with figuring out how to work modern technology, but she had no real ability to work with computers on a deeper basis like this. Stella had no idea what Natasha was doing or what was popping up or scrolling across the screen. After a short moment Natasha spoke again, “Fury was right about that ship, somebody's trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort of AI, it keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands.”  


“Can you override it?” Stella asked wondering if they were going to need to put in an emergency call to Stark. She wasn’t fond of the idea, but she would do it if it was necessary.  


“The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly,” Natasha admitted as she kept working, “I'm gonna try running a tracer. This is a program that SHIELD developed to track hostile malware, so if we can't read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from.”  


Stella was about to ask whether using SHIELD tech was really a good idea right then when an Apple employee came over.  


“Can I help you guys with anything?” he asked cheerfully. Natasha immediately went into undercover mode. She flashed a huge smile at the man and cuddled up closer to Stella.  


“Oh, no,” Natasha replied and if Stella hadn’t known the woman’s skills as a spy she would have been stunned by just how different this persona was from Natasha, “My fiancé was just helping me with some honeymoon destinations.”  


“Right! We're getting married,” Stella blurted out and could kick herself for it. That was probably the dumbest response that could have come out of her mouth, and it was making her depressed. After all, Stella had missed out on her dreams of happily ever after with Peggy, which would have featured a wedding, and maybe even kids. Peggy had her own kind of happily ever after away from Stella, but it wasn’t the vision they had during the war, the vision of Stella and Peggy, married, Bucky living with them to save money, Howard staying around, taking them dancing or to clubs or on holidays away from everything where Stella would never have to pretend.  


Stella forced herself to pay attention as the man replied to her idiotic response.  


“Congratulations,” he said with the kind of bright cheerfulness that all service employees learned very fast, “Where are you guys thinking about going?”  


Stella didn’t have an easy lie and Natasha was using the man’s distraction to keep on working the program to try to find an answer. Stella looked at the screen where Natasha was working and noted that a map was filling the screen now, and was narrowing down to a region in New England and narrowing further into New Jersey.  


Stella looked back at the man and replied, “New Jersey.”  


The man’s expression dropped a little. He was trying to keep the customer-is-always-right-smile on his face, but it was obviously an effort, “Oh.” He then took a harder look at Stella and she was convinced that she had been made. He was a superhero fan or something and he had recognized her face. And then he spoke, “I have the exact same glasses.”  


“Wow, you two are practically twins,” Natasha said, and Stella could hear just how sardonic Natasha had meant it, although the guy in front of them didn’t quite seem to catch it.  


“Yeah, I wish,” he said looking impressed, his arms moved up and down as he added, “Specimen. Uh...if you guys need anything, I've been Aaron.”  


“Thank you,” Stella replied and watched as Aaron turned away. She checked the time and looked to Natasha, “You said nine minutes, come on.”  


“Shh, relax. Got it,” Natasha said with a couple more flicks of keyboard. The screen was indicating Wheaton, New Jersey. Natasha looked at Stella and asked, “You know it?”  


“I used to. Let's go,” Stella said as she pulled the drive free of the computer. The screens went down and the left the store. Again they were walking as fast as they could without drawing attention to themselves. Stella caught sight of a tactical team, “Standard tac-team. Two behind, to across, two coming straight at us. If they make us, I'll engage, you hit the south escalator to the metro.”  


Stella was working tactical situations through her head as fast as she could. They would have to watch out for civilian casualties and dodge through the crowds, but if they split up they should be able to draw enough of the fire that most of the civilians could get out of the way.  


“Shut up and put your arm around me, laugh at something I said,” Natasha ordered brusquely.  


“What?” Stella asked confused.  


“Do it!” Natasha commanded quietly. Stella did exactly as she was ordered and was stunned to see the agent walk right past them. They continued through the upper floor of the mall. As they walked they quietly discussed exit strategies. They came to the consensus that leaving in the same car they came in wasn’t a good idea, but they needed to get to New Jersey and there was no public transport that was going to get them there. Not in the kind of anonymity that they needed.  


Either way, going to the garage entrance on the upper floor where they had come in wasn’t the smart option. As they started down the escalator in the middle of a small crowd Natasha turned to Stella and demanded, “Kiss me.” Stella caught sight of Rumlow past Natasha and looked at Natasha again.  


“What?”  


“Public displays of affection make people very uncomfortable,” Natasha asserted simply, and while Stella was starting to put Natasha’s plan together she really wasn’t interested in kissing Natasha.  


“Yes, they do,” Stella replied feeling awkward about the situation. Natasha pulled her down and kissed her. The good news was Rumlow went the rest of the way up the elevator without catching them, even though he should have been the first person to recognize them, given the fact that the two women had worked multiple missions with him, and Stella was practically a permanent fixture in his team.  


Natasha certainly knew what she was talking about.  


“You still uncomfortable?” Natasha asked with a smug look on her face.  


“It's not exactly the word I would use,” Stella replied just a little bitterly. Natasha could have at least asked a little nicer.  


They made their way onto the flattop parking and passed by a number of cars until they found a black truck with the back door slightly ajar. Stella felt a little guilty as she hit the unlock button on the front door and climbed under the steering wheel to hotwire the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter did not get as far as it was supposed to (I was supposed to get to the bridge dammit), and it's late, but life kinda happened I guess.  
> I was away from my computer for a couple days so I didn't get the chapter done on time, then I was writing and all the sudden I had over 4000 words and I wasn't anywhere near where I wanted to be in the fic. So I decided that I would just stop it at Stella hotwiring a car and get you all a chapter to read.  
> Next week should get me to the bridge (for god's sake I hope I get there, last week's chapter was supposed to end on the bridge).  
> I did get your weekly heartbreaking scene in though, so enjoy Stella's summer dress.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From stealing the truck to arriving on Sam's doorstep

Stella took the wheel and Natasha climbed into the passenger seat without any argument or question. They drove in silence until they had gotten outside of the city, which is when Natasha decided to start a conversation. 

“Where did Captain America learn how to steal a car?” Natasha asked looking over at Stella as she made herself comfortable in the front seat of the truck. 

“Nazi Germany,” Stella told her calmly, and at the noncommittal sound Natasha made in response Stella turned her head to actually look at the redhead. She had put her feet up on the dash and Stella spoke again while giving Natasha a stern look, “And we're borrowing. Take your feet off the dash.” 

Stella could see Natasha pull her feet off the dash out of the corner of her eye. There was a moment of silence before Natasha spoke again. 

“Does anyone else know?” Natasha asked her voice a little wondering, but gentle. Stella looked over at Natasha confused. Was she asking if anyone else knew about her learning how to steal cars in the war? Natasha gave her head a tiny shake and elaborated, “I mean, about you. Who you really are behind your masks.” 

Stella didn’t answer immediately. What exactly was the answer to that question? Peggy obviously knew, although she got lost in time, and Stella had sort of told Pepper only a few days ago, so she sort of knew. Did anyone other than Natasha really know what was going on beneath the Steve Rogers mask? 

“I met a woman at the Stella Memorial Day,” Stella finally admitted, “We didn’t talk very long, but I think she would be someone to talk to, maybe have lunch with, hang out. I didn’t explain everything, but I introduced myself as Stella, and she knew who I was.” 

“This mystery woman have a name?” Natasha asked with her matchmaking smirk. 

“Yes,” Stella replied smiling just a little bit, “Pepper. I don’t know, something about her…I just kind of felt like she could know Stella, instead of Steve, you know?” 

“Sort of,” Natasha admitted, “I mean, I’ve never trusted someone right after meeting them, but there are a few people I think really know the layers of truth in me.” 

“Oh?” Stella glanced over at Natasha again, the redhead was looking out the side window, facing away from Stella. Stella took the hint and turned back to the road. 

“Fury, he…well, he knew a lot. I looked up to him, you know? He was a spy, but he had a life and he was on the right side of things. I think he really could understand the way someone like me has lived their life,” Natasha was speaking quietly. If Stella’s hearing hadn’t been improved by the serum she probably would have been straining to catch what the other woman was saying. 

“The world lost a lot with him, and most people will never even know,” Stella admitted. She hadn’t totally agreed with Fury, but she also knew that he had done a lot for the world, and much of it would never be acknowledged by anyone for one reason or another. 

“He treated me well, even when I was a new asset with ties to enemy countries and a long list of hits and crimes attributed to me,” Natasha answered finally turning back to look at Stella. Her face was more open than she usually allowed and Stella let herself trust that what Natasha was showing her was real; no masks. “I think I wanted to think of him as a father-figure, so I did. And he let me. There was no doubt that he knew exactly what I was doing. He wasn’t cuddly or anything, but he was warmer to me than anyone I had ever let myself think of as a pseudo-father-figure.” 

Stella didn’t respond immediately. She let Natasha decide if this conversation would continue. For a long time neither of them said anything. Then Natasha finally spoke into the nearly oppressive silence. 

“Clint is the only one who knows everything,” Natasha said, “I told him about everything, all the secrets, all the lies, all the masks. You’re not far behind though, you know? You know more than most people.” 

“And I’m honored that you let me in,” Stella admitted looking over at Natasha again, “Even if I only gets glimpses under one mask, it’s more than I’ve seen you allow anyone else.” 

“You deserve it,” Natasha said simply. Then a silence stretched out between them again. They drove for miles without a word, Natasha eventually pulled a little MP3 player out of her pocket and set it playing light pop music. Some of it was in English, some in French, a couple that Stella thought might be Russian, and one song completely in some language that Stella had never even heard before. Stella finally pulled up outside of a fenced in compound and pulled the truck into park. 

“This is it?” Stella asked looking through the fence. It wasn’t really how she remembered things. The buildings had changed, some of them were gone entirely, and other in different places. But the shape of the ground and the building just in front of her was exactly as it had been 70 years ago when she had been driven to the base for basic training after Erskine gave her the opportunity. 

“The file came from these coordinates,” Natasha said as Stella turned the truck off and they both climbed out of the vehicle. 

“So did I,” Stella admitted as Natasha picked the lock open and they made their way into the abandoned base. “This camp is where I was trained.” 

“Changed much?” Natasha asked as they made their way deeper into the grounds. 

“A little,” Stella admitted 

\-- 

Stella was sitting away from the other recruits and panting. She couldn’t get enough air, but that wasn’t new. Hodge was holding court with a group of the recruits, he was telling some kind of story and half the recruits were hanging off his every word, and the other half were pretending to so as not to come under his disfavor. Most of the men in their basic group were convinced that at the end of training Hodge was going to be chosen for whatever secret project they had all agreed to be a part of. 

Stella was still sitting there when she saw Agent Carter walk past and roll her eyes behind Hodge’s back. Stella found herself grinning even as she struggled to regain her breath after the three mile run this morning. 

\-- 

“This is a dead end. Zero heat signature, zero waves, not even radio. Whoever wrote the file must have used a router to throw people off,” Natasha complained as she looked down at a device in her hand. Stella hadn’t even noticed her pulling it out, Stella glanced around her again and managed to recognize one of the buildings as the old barracks, but the building next to it was newer, and obviously designed as a munitions storage. Stella started towards the new building with purpose and Natasha followed in a confused sort of manner, “What is it?” 

“Army regulations forbid storing ammunition within five hundred yards from the barracks,” Stella explained as she made her way across the distance, “This building is in the wrong place.” Stella was never going to be good as picking locks. Bucky had tried to teach her when they were teenagers, Peggy had attempted during the war, and Natasha had given her an increasingly frustrated series of lessons in lock-picking. So Stella didn’t even try to pick the old lock on the door, she just smashed the side of her shield into it. 

Natasha gave Stella a rather unimpressed look as she followed the taller woman into the bunker. Stella hit the lights and it was immediately apparent that they were on the right track. On the other side of the space was a version of the SHIELD logo. 

“This is SHIELD,” Natasha stated in a tone of mild surprise. Like she hadn’t really expected to find the worst possible answer here. 

“Maybe where it started,” Stella answered as she continued forward to explore the space. A side room was clearly an office of some kind, at some point and along one wall was a series of framed photos of painfully familiar faces. There was Colonel Phillips looking as stern and angry as ever, Howard looking a little pompous but serious, and Peggy looking every inch the agent. Stella knew from reading old files that the three of them had indeed been the founders of SHIELD, and Stella and Natasha were probably standing in the middle of the original base for SHIELD. 

“There's Stark's father,” Natasha said looking curious, and just a tinge annoyed. Within seconds though her eyes had flicked over to Stella in a way which could only be read as nervousness, or maybe guilt. But Stella brushed it off as best she could and nodded. 

“Howard,” Stella replied simply. She didn’t want to admit to the way her words were sticking to the back of her throat a little. Natasha hesitated for a moment before turning to look at Stella more fully. 

“And Director Carter, right?” Natasha asked looking more for a reaction than a response; she knew the answer already. 

“I read all the files, but they really did start a secret spy organization didn’t they?” Stella said looking at the photos closely. They looked much like they had during the way, Stella couldn’t imagine that they were taken more than five or six years after Stella fell. 

“They did,” Natasha acknowledged. 

“I never could quite understand how things fell apart after I crashed,” Stella admitted, as much to herself as the woman next to her. “Sure, they argued during the war, but most of it was joking, teasing. But I woke up and Peggy and Howard had both married other people, had kids with other people. I just…I don’t understand it, Peggy won’t talk about it, and there’s no one else who knew about us in those days to ask.” 

Natasha didn’t answer, and Stella didn’t expect her to. They were supposed to be finding the source of the drive, not listening to all of Stella’s problems dealing with what she’s lost over the last 70 years. They can deal with her issues after they can be sure that the world is safe. Stella turned and started walking further into the room and she stopped by the huge built-in bookshelf against one wall. She examined it for a moment before turning to look at Natasha again. 

“If you already working in a secret office...” Stella began before pushing one of the bookshelves aside, “Why do you need to hide the elevator?” 

They climbed into the elevator together and the ride down to the only other floor was in silence. The elevator doors opened onto a view of what seemed like miles of huge computer towers. Stella couldn’t pinpoint their age, but they were certainly quite old compared to what she had seen since she woke. 

“This can't be the data-point, this technology is ancient,” Natasha said as she wandered further into the room. There was a command station straight ahead from the elevator and they both walked towards it. Natasha spotted something and sped up just a little. By the time Stella caught up with her Natasha had already pushed the drive into a USB reader, which had been somehow hooked into the much older system. 

“Initiate system?” the computer asked in a digitally created voice. 

Natasha started typing and spoke as she did, “Y-E-S, spells yes.” The computer system booted up and Natasha smiled and turned to look at Stella, "Shall we play a game?" Stella tilted her head and raised her eyebrow, she was well aware of Natasha’s nerdier habits. The fact that she found an old computer with an early voice interface and immediately started quoting 2001: A Space Odyssey was not at all surprising. Natasha continued, “It's from a movie that...” 

“Yeah, I actually saw that one already,” Stella replied, but their conversation was cut short by a familiarly accented voice speaking from the computer. 

“Rogers, Steven. Born, 1918. Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born, 1984.” Stella and Natasha exchanged looks and carefully checked out the room. Natasha caught sight of the camera first and tilted her head almost imperceptibly towards it for Stella. 

“It's some kind of a recording,” Natasha said calmly. Stella knew immediately that Natasha was not at all sure of that assertion, and she probably suspected that someone was watching through the computer from somewhere else. 

“I am not a recording, Fräulein,” the voice replied back and Stella was sure she knew that accent, it was something she knew before the war, central Europe somewhere, German or Austrian, maybe Swiss. The voice continued speaking, “I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am.” Then the screen was showing them a photo of Zola. 

“Do you know this thing?” Natasha asked looking more closely at Stella. Whatever it was that Natasha saw in her face, the smaller woman didn’t like it. 

\-- 

It took Stella fifteen minutes to get around to pulling herself up into the train. It took less than five to get to the front of the train where the rest of the Howlies had already cornered Zola. Stella knew that the boys didn’t miss the fact that Bucky wasn’t with her, and there was no way they missed the dead look in Stella’s eyes. 

She was going to finish this mission and she was going to deal with Zola and she would deliver the news to Peggy and Howard herself, she refused to let anyone else tell them. They would need each other. 

Zola was already cowering when Stella came through the door with her shield up and her expression stony. 

“You’re coming with us,” Stella told him simply. Her voice sounded unfamiliar to her. It seemed deeper than normal, and there was a complete lack of emotion in it which Stella would have never suspected herself capable of. 

Zola didn’t say anything, but allowed Stella tie his hands behind his back with a piece of rope and a stupidly complicated knot. Stella checked his hands, sleeves, and pockets herself for anything which Zola could use to cut the rope apart, and when she was satisfied they set him in the middle of the compartment where he couldn’t get a hold of anything to free himself. 

He wasn’t much of a fighter from any of the reports, he was a scientist who seemed to have little love of violence. Why he agreed to work with or for any part of the Nazi organization was almost assuredly cowardice. 

The rest of the Howlies stepped out of the compartment to assure that the train would be stopping exactly where they wanted it. Zola watched Stella every bit as closely as she was watching him. 

“Too bad my best experiment is gone,” Zola said in a quiet voice, which was intended to only carry as far as Stella’s ears. “He’s the only one who survived.” 

Stella stomped to the door and had Dugan take her place. Phillips would be rather upset with her if she killed the little man. 

\-- 

“Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull. He's been dead for years,” Stella replied with just the facts. Zola had to be dead, he was years Stella’s senior, and it had been 70 years. The man had to be dead. 

“First correction, I am Swiss. Second, look around you. I have never been more alive. In 1972 I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body, my mind, however, that was worth saving on two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain,” Zola replied with a huffy sort of tone. That was familiar, Stella had watched parts of Zola’s interrogation. She had also listened to some of the recordings of the information Zola passed along. Once Phillips found out that Bucky was lost in that mission, Stella hadn’t been allowed in the same room as him. 

“How did you get here?” Stella demanded. 

“Invited,” Zola replied sounding smug. How could some computer recording of Zola’s brain be that smug? 

“It was Operation Paperclip after World War II,” Natasha added. Stella had seen a mention of it in one of the files, but hadn’t investigated it. She wished now that she had looked into it. “SHIELD recruited German scientists with strategic values.” 

“They thought I could help their cause. I also helped my own,” Zola added. 

“Hydra died with the Red Skull,” Stella interjected. Hydra had to be gone, she simply couldn’t deal with the idea that Hydra wasn’t gone. 

“Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.” 

“Prove it.” 

“Accessing archive,” Zola’s voice was more mechanized for a moment and the screens flickered with scenes and photos. Schmidt and the other founders of Hydra. Zola continued his explanation, 

“Hydra was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. What we did not realize, was that if you try to take that freedom, they resist. The war taught us much. Humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly. After the war, SHIELD was founded and I was recruited. The new Hydra grew. A beautiful parasite inside SHIELD. For seventy years Hydra has been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war. And when history did not cooperate, history was changed.” 

“That's impossible, SHIELD would have stopped you,” Natasha argued. 

“Accidents will happen,” Zola was sly with that addition before he showed news reports and clips of files with Howard and Maria Starks’s deaths. And god but that hurt her, Stella wasn't even sure how much Howard's death had hurt until she saw those news reports run across the screen in front of her. Hydra inside the organization which Howard and Peggy had created together. In a sense it was the only child they ever had together. And then there were additional files about Fury’s death flashing across the screen. Someone was keeping Zola updated in real time, it hadn’t even been 24 hours since Fury’s death. “Hydra created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security. Once the purification process is complete, Hydra's new world order will arise. We won, Captain. Your death amounts to the same as your Life; a zero sum.” Stella didn’t even realize what she was doing until her fist had gone down in the middle of the screen Zola was using to project an approximation of his face. Before Stella could react to her own actions Zola was projecting his face onto a different monitor and he was continuing his monologue, “As I was saying... What's on this drive? Project Insight requires insight. So I wrote an algorithm.” 

“What kind of algorithm? What does it do?” Natasha asked leaning in a little closer to the monitor. She was looking for something beyond just the answer to her question, but the question was just what it was she was looking for. 

“The answer to your question is fascinating. Unfortunately, you shall be too dead to hear it,” Zola replied and behind them the elevator doors began to shut. Stella threw her shield at the door in an attempt to keep it from shutting all the way, but she was just a hair too late and the shield rebounded off the closed doors. Zola was still talking, “Admit it, it's better this way. We're both of us...out of time.” 

Stella looked around the room as fast as she could. There was a grate in the floor, and a recessed space under it, so Stella pulled up the grate, dragged Natasha down into the recessed space, curled up around the more vulnerable woman and pulled her shield over the largest parts of their bodies that she could manage. She couldn’t cover their legs completely, but covering their heads and chests was more important anyways, and she hoped the recessed space in the floor would provide them with enough cover to keep them from dying. 

When the explosion was over and it seemed like the rubble had shifted as far as it was going to, Stella pulled herself free carefully and lifted Natasha out. The spy had hit her head on the way down, and she was a little more battered than Stella would like, but there were no life-threatening injuries, so Stella simply lifted her and carried her out of the rubble. She could hear people moving through the rubble as well, and she caught occasional glimpses of flashlight beams as she made her way out of the base in the opposite direction of how they entered. She was just glad she remembered the back gate, and didn’t need to try and sneak around what were clearly SHIELD agents combing through the rubble and fanning out into the rest of the base looking for them. 

The next closest town was still a long ways from the base, so Stella wasn’t even trying to get there on foot. She knew that if she went far enough down the road there should be a highway, and somewhere along the highway there would be some sign of life so she could find a vehicle to get her back to DC. 

As Stella walked she found herself with more energy rather than less. Her metabolism and healing were far better than she had any real right to expect, and most of the bruises and scrapes she got from the explosion and falling rubble had begun to heal. Stella was still walking when Natasha started to stir. 

“Never thought I’d get a princess lift,” Natasha murmured into Stella’s chest. 

“Easiest way to carry you honestly,” Stella replied as she kept walking. 

“I’d offer to walk, but it’d probably slow us down,” Natasha said with her head half buried in Stella’s chest and her voice muffled on Stella’s shirt. Stella smiled without replying to Natasha’s comment. If she wasn’t up to walking she might have been hurt more than Stella had thought, but she may also just be exaggerating because she knew that Stella could carry her indefinitely. The motorcycle in the USO shows hadn’t been a prop, but a real full weight motorcycle. 

They kept moving until Stella caught sight of an old looking pickup truck parked near the road near a driveway. Stella could just see another car further down the driveway and didn’t really feel all that bad about taking this one. There were, after all, real lives on the line, she would try to make sure this truck and the last one got back to their original owners once things had been sorted out. Whenever they were eventually sorted out. 

Stella had to break one of the back windows in order to get the truck unlocked, but she cleaned up most of the glass before helping Natasha into the passenger seat. As soon as Stella hotwired the car and had it running Natasha drifted off to sleep, and Stella hoped she would be feeling better by the time they made it back to DC. 

\-- 

Stella’s first idea was to go to Natasha’s safehouse, but when she got nearby she saw an unusual number of people outside, and she didn’t dare risk stopping to investigate, so Stella rounded towards her own safehouse before realizing that she didn’t want anyone even getting close to finding the place. So she turned around and found herself not far from the National Mall. It was then that she realized that she had another safehouse that she hadn’t ever considered a safehouse. After all, the only person who knew about Sam was drifting in and out of a nap in the passenger seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is late everyone. I picked up a shift at work last week and had less time to get it finished, and I have full-time at work now so I have less time to write. On that note I'm going to be aiming for a bi-weekly update schedule for now. I only really have two days a week to write, and it's a lot harder to get things out with the limited time-frame.  
> Also, the second flashback in this chapter was not originally planned. I actually went to start writing it and decided I didn't need to be that mean. Then I was writing the conversation with Zola (well, drawing the dialogue from the movie and working in motivations and background infromation), and I decided I actually did need that scene, so I'm sorry about that.


End file.
